As GitHub intensifies its focus on accelerating and simplifying software development through AI integration, it sets to launch the general availability of GitHub Copilot Chat next month, which has been under beta testing. GitHub also unveiled previews of GitHub Copilot Enterprise and AI-boosted security capabilities further solidifying its investment in AI-driven solutions.
GitHub Copilot Chat, on track to its formal public introduction and inclusion in existing GitHub Copilot subscriptions, enables an interactive environment via a chat interface for developers to engage with the GitHub Copilot. This interface is accessible in several languages to allow developers across the world to avail of its benefits. The Copilot Chat provide answers to coding-related queries inside a number of integrated development environments (IDEs), such as JetBrains IDEs, Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, and the Neovim editor. Currently, it features a preview for JetBrains support.
The GitHub Copilot Chat draws its power from OpenAI’s GPT-4 large multimodal model, allowing it to offer precise code advice, elucidations, and guidelines. A new feature in the platform helps developers to deliberate over individual lines of code. GitHub is also set to introduce slash commands to facilitate tasks like generating unit tests.
Developers can directly integrate GitHub Copilot Chat with the GitHub platform at github.com to delve deeper into the code, pull requests, documents, and find solutions to general programming queries. In addition, the Copilot Chat will also be available on GitHub’s mobile app. Developers can leverage this feature to resolve their coding issues by typing or using speech-to-text capabilities on their iPhone and Android devices.
Designed for organizations, GitHub Copilot Enterprise ropes in all the features of GitHub Copilot and connects the chat to repositories on github.com. This provision allows for personalized interaction with the platform, allowing teams to build and search documentation, get suggestions based on private and internal code, and review pull requests. The Copilot Business program is also included here, and is anticipated to go public in February 2024, priced at $39 for each user per month.
Though the GitHub Copilot relies on natural language text and source code from publicly available sources for training, it has occasionally been a subject of controversy. Concerns have been raised over the legality of its utilization of open-source licensed code for training. GitHub, however, vociferously holds the belief that Copilot adheres to the relevant laws.
Several other announcements were made on November 8 by GitHub. For instance, the GitHub Copilot Partner Program aims to foster a plugin ecosystem for GitHub Copilot with a purpose to expand the range of tasks developers can perform with AI.
Another notable announcement is about GitHub Copilot Workspace by the research team at GitHub Next. This innovative AI-assisted bridge is designed to assist developers in transforming their ideas into codes and is due to arrive in 2024.
Further, GitHub intends to enhance GitHub Advanced Security with AI-powered application security testing designed to uncover and nail vulnerabilities and secrets in codes. Code scanning autofix is expected to be included in the subscriptions soon, and secrets scanning is designed to find leaked secrets with reduced false positive rates.
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