GitHub Announces Its 'Refounding' on Copilot, Including an AI-Powered 'Copilot Chat' Assistant

This week GitHub announced the approaching general availability of the GPT-4-powered GitHub Copilot Chat in December "as part of your existing GitHub Copilot subscription" (and "available at no cost to verified teachers, students, and maintainers of popular open source projects.") And this "code-aware guidance and code generation" will also be integrated directly into github.com, "so developers can dig into code, pull requests, documentation, and general coding questions with Copilot Chat providing suggestions, summaries, analysis, and answers." With GitHub Copilot Chat we're enabling the rise of natural language as the new universal programming language for every developer on the planet. Whether it's finding an error, writing unit tests, or helping debug code, Copilot Chat is your AI companion through it all, allowing you to write and understand code using whatever language you speak... Copilot Chat uses your code as context, and is able to explain complex concepts, suggest code based on your open files and windows, help detect security vulnerabilities, and help with finding and fixing errors in code, terminal, and debugger... With the new inline Copilot Chat, developers can chat about specific lines of code, directly within the flow of their code and editor. InfoWorld notes it will chat in "whatever language a developer speaks." (And that Copilot Chat will also be available in GitHub's mobile app.) But why wait until December? GitHub's blog post says that Copilot Chat "will come to the JetBrains suite of IDEs, available in preview today." GitHub also plans to introduce "slash commands and context variables" for GitHub Copilot, "so fixing or improving code is as simple as entering /fix and generating tests now starts with /tests." "With Copilot in the code editor, in the CLI, and now Copilot Chat on github.com and in our mobile app, we are making Copilot ubiquitous throughout the software development lifecycle and always available in all of GitHub's surface areas..." CNBC adds that "Microsoft-owned GitHub" also plans to introduce "a more expensive Copilot assistant" in February "for developers inside companies that can explain and provide recommendations about internal source code." Wednesday's blog post announcing these updates was written by GitHub's CEO, who seemed to be predicting an evolutionary leap into a new future. "Just as GitHub was founded on Git, today we are re-founded on Copilot." He promised they'd built on their vision of a future "where AI infuses every step of the developer lifecycle."Open source and Git have fundamentally transformed how we build software. It is now evident that AI is ushering in the same sweeping change, and at an exponential pace... We are certain this foundational transformation of the GitHub platform, and categorically new way of software development, is necessary in a world dependent on software. Every day, the world's developers balance an unsustainable demand to both modernize the legacy code of yesterday and build our digital tomorrow. It is our guiding conviction to make it easier for developers to do it all, from the creative spark to the commit, pull request, code review, and deploy - and to do it all with GitHub Copilot deeply integrated into the developer experience. And if you're worried about the security of AI-generated code...Today, GitHub Copilot applies an LLM-based vulnerability prevention system that blocks insecure coding patterns in real-time to make GitHub Copilot's suggestions more secure. Our model targets the most common vulnerable coding patterns, including hardcoded credentials, SQL injections, and path injections. GitHub Copilot Chat can also help identify security vulnerabilities in the IDE, explain the mechanics of a vulnerability with its natural language capabilities, and suggest a specific fix for the highlighted code. But for Enterprise accounts paying for GitHub Advanced Security, there's also an upgrade coming: "new AI-powered application security testing features designed to detect and remediate vulnerabilities and secrets in your code." (It's already available in preview mode.) GitHub even announced plans for a new AI assistant in 2024 that generates a step-by-step plan for responding to GitHub issues. (GitHub describes it as "like a pair programming session with a partner that knows about every inch of the project, and can follow your lead to make repository-wide changes from the issue to the pull request with the power of AI.") CNBC notes that AI-powered coding assistants "are still nascent, though, with less than 10% enterprise adoption, according to Gartner, a technology industry research firm." But last month Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts GitHub Copilot already had one million paying users... And GitHub's blog post concludes, "And we're just getting started."

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