The latest on GitHub Copilot and how it will change software development

In case you missed it: last week at GitHub Universe , we announced a handful of very exciting updates to GitHub Copilot , the world’s most widely adopted AI developer tool. ????

Watch Universe keynotes and sessions on-demand at githubuniverse.com and check out what’s new:

• GitHub Copilot Chat (and its many upgrades, which we’ll dive into below!) will be generally available in December 2023 as part of your existing GitHub Copilot subscription for organizations and individuals.
• We launched GitHub Copilot Enterprise to bring personalized AI experiences to your organization. With this feature, Copilot offerings can now be customized with the full context of your entire codebase and secured with enterprise-grade security, safety, and privacy.
• The GitHub Copilot Partner Program will create an ecosystem for third-party developer tools, online services, and knowledge outside GitHub. That means new networks will be infused into GitHub Copilot, broadening the expanse of what developers can achieve with AI.
• New AI-powered security features in GitHub Advanced Security include code scanning autofix and AI secret scanning for generic secrets. These features are available in preview and will soon be included in your GitHub Advanced Security subscription.
• Coming up in 2024 is GitHub Copilot Workspace. When you open an issue in Copilot Workspace, you’ll get a proposed plan for how to implement the intended change. This plan is automatically generated by combining the details of an issue with the knowledge of a codespace and the reasoning capabilities of GPT-4. But the workspace is fully editable, which means you’ll steer the AI in the direction you want.

Pretty amazing, right? Join the waitlist today , and continue reading for more details about Copilot Chat upgrades.

• GPT-4 powers GitHub Copilot Chat, which means more accurate code suggestions and explanations. ??
• If you’re a verified teacher, student, or maintainer of a popular open source project, Copilot Chat will be available at no cost. ??
• Copilot Chat is available on github.com , our mobile app, and the JetBrains suite of IDEs. The new inline Copilot Chat also means developers can chat about specific lines of code, directly within the flow of their code and editor. ????
• Slash commands and context variables in GitHub Copilot make fixing or improving code as simple as entering /fix and generating tests now starts with /tests. ??
• Whether you need to fix suggestions, pull request review content, or speed up commits and pull requests with a generated response, smart actions enable the power of AI with just a click, offering powerful shortcuts for your workflow. ??

Get a full rundown on these updates and check out demo videos here .?

What do all of these changes mean for the developer? Here’s how they can help you in your day-to-day:

• Augment your understanding of code and documentation with AI. Integrating Copilot Chat directly into github.com means developers can dig into code, pull requests, documentation, and general coding questions with Copilot Chat providing suggestions, summaries, analysis, and answers. And, combined with the power of GitHub’s advanced code search , we’re enabling Copilot Chat to understand and help with the latest changes to popular open source projects.
• Get the job done even when you’re not at your desk. Bringing Copilot Chat into our mobile app, as part of your existing GitHub Copilot subscription, means developers can use the power of natural language to get answers to any programming question about the repositories, files, or documentation they’re viewing in the app.

• Use the full context of your codebase to build with AI. With Copilot Chat connected to your repositories on github.com , Copilot Enterprise allows you to quickly get up to speed on your codebase, search through and build documentation, get suggestions based on internal and private code, and easily review pull requests. Additionally, smart Actions, such as the ability to generate pull request summaries, will be available throughout GitHub helping developers stay in their flow state with the click of a button. And of course, this all comes with enterprise-grade security, safety, and privacy.
• Use AI to quickly detect and remediate vulnerabilities and secrets in your code. Code scanning autofix suggests AI-generated fixes using CodeQL for JavaScript and TypeScript directly in pull requests—assisting developers in resolving issues faster and reducing the introduction of new vulnerabilities into codebases. Secret scanning for generic secrets and our new regular expression generator for custom patterns, makes it easier to find leaked secrets with low false positives rates.

• Integrate AI throughout your tech stack, including third-party tools. We launched the first phase of the GitHub Copilot Partner Program with over 25 debut partners, including Datastax, LaunchDarkly, Postman, Hashicorp, and Datadog. Everything from helping to improve the performance of database queries, to checking the status of a feature flag, viewing the results of an A/B test, and more will soon be possible thanks to the partners who are building plugins for GitHub Copilot.

Ready to dive into this new reality? Join the waitlist today .

Our annual Octoverse 2023 report is here! This year, we look at what it takes for a technology to go mainstream. We study how open source activity around AI, the cloud, and Git has changed the developer experience and is increasingly driving impact among developers and organizations alike.

Read the full report here .

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