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GitHub, the world’s largest software development collaboration platform, has announced its first step in bringing GitHub Copilot X to enterprise companies and organisations with a limited public beta release of GitHub Copilot Chat for all business users on Visual Studio and VS Code.

Copilot Chat isn’t just a chat window. It is contextually aware of the code a developer has typed or what error messages are shown. And that context is key—unlike a general-purpose generative AI chat assistant, GitHub Copilot Chat is designed for developers and fits right into the IDE. In short, GitHub is taking what works for general purpose and making it contextually aware of a developer’s environment.

Simplifying the Most Complex Tasks

Mario Rodriguez, Vice President of Product at GitHub, said: “This new evolution turns GitHub Copilot into a context-aware conversational assistant right in the IDE, allowing developers to execute some of the most complex tasks with simple prompts. Every developer on your team, from the least to the most experienced, will be able to build entire applications or debug vast arrays of code in a matter of minutes instead of a matter of days.”

He added: “Weeks or months spent slogging over unit tests and endless backlogs of boilerplate code will be a thing of the past. As the centrepiece feature of GitHub Copilot X, we believe Copilot Chat will swing the doors wide open to a new age where natural language powers the coding experience, democratising software development as we know it and making entire teams of developers happier and more productive.”

Rodriguez further said: “We want to help developers spend their time on what matters most: building what’s next. And this work started with GitHub Copilot offering code suggestions right in the IDE—but now with Copilot Chat, developers can not only get code suggestions, but ask questions, get explanations, offer prompts for code, and more. That means they’re spending more time in the IDE—and in the flow.”

Critical Capabilities

Key features of Copilot Chat include:

• Personalised assistance. Copilot Chat offers context-specific support to developers. So, whether engineers are stuck on a particular code snippet or need guidance on a specific programming concept, Copilot Chat is ready to help.
• Real-time guidance. Copilot Chat suggests best practices, tips and solutions tailored to specific coding challenges—all in real time.
• Fixing security issues. Copilot Chat can make suggestions for remediation, helping to reduce the number of vulnerabilities found during security scans.
• Code analysis. Don’t know what a code block is supposed to do? Ask Copilot Chat. It can also break down complex concepts and explain code snippets.
• Simple troubleshooting. Trying to debug code? Copilot Chat not only identifies issues, but also offers suggestions, explanations, and alternative approaches.

Keeping Developers in the Flow

All of this is designed to keep developers in the flow, which has become increasingly challenging amid an explosion of languages, cloud computing, programming frameworks, CI/CD workflows, open source software, package managers, services and more over the past 20 years.

Developers today can build more than ever. Yet, they also are spending more and more time spelunking through documentation and search results to figure out how to connect to an API, use a new database or understand what a colleague was trying to accomplish.

Research proves as much. According to Stack Overflow’s 2023 Developer Survey, 63% of developers say they spend at least 30 minutes a day and up to two hours looking for answers and solutions. And that’s time they’re not able to be creative or innovate on new solutions for their customers.

Helping Out Already

As the world’s first at-scale AI pair programmer, GitHub Copilot is already helping more than 20,000 companies and teams of developers with the ability to do their work in half the time. According to research from the analyst firm Keystone.AI and Harvard Business School professor Marco Iansiti, generative AI tools like GitHub Copilot have the potential to increase global GDP (gross domestic product) by $1.5 trillion by 2030 by driving significant productivity gains.

Earlier this year, GitHub announced GitHub Copilot X, which featured a number of technical previews designed to bring the power of generative AI and GPT-4 throughout the entire developer experience on GitHub. As GitHub prepares to bring the entirety of GitHub Copilot X to general availability, the company believes every developer could be made 10 times more productive. This means 10 days of work, done in one day. 10 hours of work, done in one hour. 10 minutes of work, done with a single prompt command. This will allow developers to amplify their truest self-expression. And it will help a new generation of developers learn and build at the speed of thought.

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