[…] Introduced last summer after a year-long technical trial, Copilot offers coding suggestions, though not always good ones, to developers using GitHub with supported text editors and IDEs, like Visual Studio Code.
As of last month, according to GitHub, Copilot had a hand in 46 percent of the code being created on Microsoft’s cloud repo depot and had helped developers program up to 55 percent faster.
On Wednesday, Copilot – an AI “pair programmer”, as GitHub puts it – will be ready to converse with developers ChatGPT-style in either Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio. Prompt-and-response conversations take place in an IDE sidebar chat window, as opposed to the autocompletion responses that get generated from comment-based queries in a source file.
“Copilot chat is not just a chat window,” said Dohmke. “It recognizes what code a developer has typed, what error messages are shown, and it’s deeply embedded into the IDE.”
A developer thus can highlight, say, a regex in a source file and invite Copilot to explain what the obtuse pattern matching expression does. Copilot can also be asked to generate tests, to analyze and debug, to propose a fix, or to attempt a custom task. The model can even add comments that explain source code and can clean files up like a linter.
More interesting still, Copilot can be addressed by voice. Using spoken prompts, the assistive software can produce (or reproduce) code and run it on demand. It’s a worthy accessibility option at least.
[…]
When making a pull request under the watchful eye of AI, developers can expect to find GitHub’s model will fill out tags that serve to provide additional information about what’s going on. It then falls to developers to accept or revise the suggestions.
[…]
What’s more, Copilot’s ambit has been extended to documentation. Starting with documentation for React, Azure Docs, and MDN, developers can pose questions and get AI-generated answers through a chat interface. In time, according to Dohmke, the ability to interact with documentation via a chat interface will be extended to any organization’s repositories and internal documentation.
[…]
GitHub has even helped Copilot colonize the command line, with GitHub Copilot CLI. If you’ve ever forgotten an obscure command line incantation or command flag, Copilot has you covered
[…]
Source: GitHub Copilot has some new tricks up its sleeve • The Register
Robin Edgar
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