News
GitHub Announces Copilot Chat Availability, Unveils Copilot Enterprise
Github, the Microsoft-owned open source code repository, made a handful of generative AI-based announcements on Wednesday, including the upcoming general availability of GitHub Copilot Chat and GitHub Copilot Enterprise.
GitHub Copilot Chat was released as a public beta in July and will be available for all GitHub Copilot individual and organizational users as a full release in December.
This advanced tool, integrated into Visual Studio and VS Code, is powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 and provides real-time coding assistance. It offers features like code analysis, troubleshooting and the ability to suggest security patches, all in natural language. Additionally, it can help developers learn new programming languages and frameworks within the IDE, streamlining the development process and reducing the need for context switching​​.
Along with the announced release, Github said the following upgrades are coming to the service:
- Chat powered by OpenAI's ChatGTP 4.
- Enhanced code generation and guidance.
- Inline Copilot Chat, which will allow devs to discuss specific lines of code.
- Introduction of slash commands and context variables.
GitHub has also announced a new Copilot Chat targeted at organizations, called GitHub Copilot Enterprise. The new service will aim to provide development teams more customization options for collaboration. According to a GitHub announcement, "Copilot Enterprise allows your teams of developers to quickly get up to speed on your codebase, search through and build documentation, get suggestions based on internal and private code, and quickly review pull requests."
The new service will be an enhanced version of GitHub Copilot Chat, and will allow developers to get suggested results based off of internal and private code, provide pull request summaries through smart actions and will provide privacy and security features to make sure enterprise code does not leave the organization.
GitHub Copilot Enterprise will be available in February for $39 per user per month.
Finally, GitHub has announced that Copilot Workplace, which will arrive sometime in 2024, will use AI to help streamline the development process – from idea to final code.  Â
"By combining the details of the issue with the knowledge of the codebase and the reasoning capabilities of GPT-4, our research team at GitHub Next has developed an AI-powered bridge to help every developer scale the barrier of putting an idea into code: we call it the GitHub Copilot Workspace."
While details are limited, GitHub said that the new feature is part of its "GitHub Next visiton," and aims at streamlining code development using natural language.