GitHub has announced the limited public beta launch of Copilot Chat, bringing conversational coding capabilities to GitHub Copilot users. The new feature extends Copilot's AI code suggestions to allow developers to get help through natural language prompts and questions.
Copilot Chat is now available to all GitHub Copilot for Business users, enabling teams at every organization to start experiencing the power of conversational coding directly within Visual Studio and VS Code. It represents a major step forward in GitHub's vision for Copilot X, an initiative the company announced earlier this year that aims to integrate generative AI throughout the developer workflow.
Turning Copilot into a context-aware chatbot means developers can execute complex tasks through simple natural language prompts. GitHub believes this could empower developers to build entire applications in minutes rather than days. According to the company, Copilot Chat has the potential to "democratize software development as we know it." It constitutes a shift toward tools that drastically improve developer productivity and happiness.
A key advantage of Copilot Chat is its tight integration with the development environment. As a contextual chatbot, it recognizes code developers have written and error messages. This keeps developers focused without having to switch between applications. They can get personalized assistance, explanations, and troubleshooting suggestions tailored to their specific coding challenge.
Some of the capabilities highlight by GitHub include:
- Personalized assistance. GitHub Copilot Chat offers context-specific support to developers. So, whether your engineers are stuck on a particular code snippet or need guidance on a specific programming concept, GitHub Copilot Chat is ready to help.
- Real-time guidance. GitHub Copilot Chat suggests best practices, tips, and solutions tailored to specific coding challenges—all in real time.
- Fixing security issues. GitHub Copilot Chat can make suggestions for remediation, helping to reduce the number of vulnerabilities found during security scans.
- Code analysis. Don’t know what a code block is supposed to do? Ask GitHub Copilot Chat. It can also break down complex concepts and explain code snippets.
- Simple troubleshooting. Trying to debug code? GitHub Copilot Chat not only identifies issues, but also offers suggestions, explanations, and alternative approaches.
Copilot Chat is the latest evolution of Copilot, which has already been adopted by over 20,000 organizations as an AI pair programmer. Studies have shown Copilot can reduce the time required to complete tasks by up to 50%. The addition of conversational capabilities stands to boost these productivity gains even further.
The Copilot Chat beta must be enabled through an organization's GitHub admin console. Once enabled, all Copilot users at the organization will have access through VS Code and Visual Studio.
The beta brings GitHub one step closer toward its vision for Copilot X while allowing organizations to get an early preview of how conversational coding might transform their development teams.