Microsoft-owned GitHub is overhauling its Copilot system today to integrate OpenAI’s GPT-4 model and bring chat and voice support to its AI pair programmers. GitHub Copilot is getting a giant upgrade, as part of an overall “Copilot X” vision, which includes a new ChatGPT-like experience within the code editors, allowing the chatbot to recognize and explain code and recommend changes and fix bugs.
“With Copilot X we are laying out our future vision of Copilot, which means AI is at every step of the developer lifecycle,” GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke explained in an interview with The Verge. “Fundamentally this will influence the developer experience.”
GitHub’s Copilot chat, entering technical preview today, goes beyond Copilot’s basic auto-complete comments and coding. It’s closer to a true coding assistant, like Microsoft’s new Copilot for Microsoft 365 apps. If you’ve been given a project with code from decades past and little documentation, you can now call on Copilot to help.
That help can come in the form of checking the code for security vulnerabilities or explaining how blocks of code work or even help rewriting parts or adding helpful comments for anyone digging into the code later. GitHub Copilot can sit on the edge of your integrated development environment (IDE), ready to accept commands.
“It’s a similar idea to Bing chat or the Microsoft Edge sidebar, but bringing that into the developer workflow and image completion,” Dohmke said. “I think for developers the difference between GitHub Copilot and Bing is that Copilot is code-oriented. You can ask it to fix your code, ask it to explain the code to you, and you can actually ask it to write a unit test.”
Copilot will now have a full view of your IDE, so it knows what you’ve typed in the editor and where it can be most useful. It appears as a sidebar very similar to Bing chat in Microsoft Edge, but GitHub is also working on features that will make Copilot appear elsewhere.
“We’re also going to have a mode where you bring up the chat interface inline with the code, instead of having this sidebar,” Dohmke said. “You can ask for a prompt within your code and it extends across your codebase.”
You don’t need a keyboard to code with Copilot. After experimenting with a voice-based interaction system for Copilot, GitHub is now incorporating the “Hey, GitHub!” functionality in this AI-powered chat system. You’ll be able to sit at a PC and command Copilot with your voice to answer queries or suggest lines of code.
GitHub uses a mix of OpenAI models to power its new chat and existing auto-complete features. “So when you type in your editor you want a very fast model because for every keystroke you want to have a response that’s really fast,” explains Dohmke. “Where we need speed, we use smaller models like the Codex model, and where we need accuracy like in chat we use larger models like GPT-4.”
This updated Copilot will also help with AI-generated answers about code documentation, offering answers for React, Azure docs, and MDN. GitHub uses AI to scan these open-source repositories to help developers get answers, so its chat interface is more up-to-date than the training data set on which GPT- 4.
GitHub Copilot is also coming to request requests to help developers create AI-generated descriptions. Tags are automatically completed by GitHub Copilot based on what code has changed, and then developers can review and edit them.
“At GitHub we invented the pull request more than a decade ago, so the natural next step for us was to bring Copilot to the pull request,” Dohmke said. “You can ask Copilot to describe the pull request to you, or you can ask Copilot to generate tests.”
If all this IDE integration isn’t enough, GitHub Copilot even comes with a command line interface (CLI). Developers spend a lot of time in the terminal, and remembering the syntax for so many commands is not always easy. Copilot is designed to help you write a command and then execute it.
This new Copilot X system will initially only be available within Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code apps during the technical preview, but GitHub plans to expand it to other IDEs in the future. “We’re going to open it up the same way Copilot is currently available on JetBrains and Neovim,” Dohmke said. “We want to support and meet developers where they are and support the entire ecosystem.”
GitHub’s new Copilot X features actually remind me of the work Microsoft just demoed with its Microsoft 365 Copilot. Copilot in the Office app feels like it will forever change how we create spreadsheets and Word documents, and now GitHub is building on its amazing AI assistant.
With Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella a fan of the Copilot name, will there ever be a single Copilot that helps you code one minute and organize your life and respond to your emails a few minutes later?
“By removing the boring parts from our jobs and lives, [we can focus] in more creative pieces,” Dohmke said. “By having fewer emails and having fewer things that you have to read and understand, and instead of having this Copilot layer that’s your agent that reminds you the things you need to do.”
GitHub Copilot has already played a major role in developer productivity for more than a million people, helping developers code up to 55 percent faster, according to GitHub. Dohmke thinks this will increase even more with these new chat features and AI assistants like Copilot will be important to how people learn how to code in the future.
“It’s going to be the thing you remember learning as a six-year-old,” Dohmke said. “Kids today are going to have extra brains that are really part of their learning journey as a person.”
Correction March 22nd, 11:25AM ET: GitHub has clarified that “Copilot X” is the name of its “vision” for next-gen Copilot features, but the name of its AI assistant will remain “Copilot.” This story originally announced that Copilot X was the new feature name.