GitHub, the popular code repository platform owned by Microsoft, has unveiled its ambitious vision for the future of its successful AI tool, Copilot. Called Copilot X, this AI assistant provides various features and capabilities throughout the entire development lifecycle to help automate the process of coding and debugging. With the help of Microsoft’s partner OpenAI, GitHub was able to create this new version of Copilot by utilizing the Codex model, and the company is expecting to continue improving their services with their multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI.
Among the features being tested in Copilot X is the “GitHub Copilot Chat”, a chat interface that can detect errors, explain code blocks, recognize bugs and recommend bug fixes. The chat is powered by Microsoft’s earlier work on the Bing Chat and is embedded into the integrated development environment (IDE). In addition, “Hey, Github!” is another AI assistant feature that can be used to command Copilot to write code by using natural language prompts. The company has renamed this experiment “GitHub Copilot Voice”.
GitHub also introduced the “GitHub Copilot for Pull Requests” which uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. Through this, developers can add AI powered tags to their pull request descriptions. Furthermore, GitHub Copilot can also automatically suggest sentences based on changes in the code and can give warning to developers if testing is insufficient. The company also mentions other experiments like “GitHub Copilot for Docs” and GitHub Copilot CLI or command line interface which are also capable of producing AI-generated.
GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke has commented that The Copilot X vision is “a readily accessible AI assistant throughout the entire development lifecycle.” Though the company is yet to announce the official launch of this service, those who are interested can join the waitlist and technical previews.
The person mentioned in the article is Thomas Dohmke, the CEO of GitHub. He was originally from Germany and was one of the core members of the team that started the program FileZilla. After working in various tech and open source companies, he became the CEO of GitHub in January 2019 and brought a new vision to execute for the company. He was instrumental for the launch of Copilot and is also overseeing the development and rollout of the Copilot X features.
