GitHub’s Copilot revamped with GPT-4-powered features to help developers write better code

Back in 2022, Microsoft-owned GitHub launched GitHub Copilot, a programming tool designed to help developers write and complete code by leveraging AI capabilities. It has assisted more than 1 million developers code 55% faster and is already writing 46% of code.

And today, the company has announced that it is building further upon this premise and has begun rolling a GPT-4 powered version of the programming tool, GitHub Copilot X.

GitHub Copilot X transitions the original GitHub Copilot into an AI assistant throughout the entire development lifecycle. What’s more, the new programming tool adds new features powered by GPT-4 that are designed to provide developers with a “ChatGPT-like experience”.

First up, Copilot X  is introducing chat and voice to the editor that mainly focuses on developer scenarios and natively integrates with both VS Code and Visual Studio. Developers can interact with it via text or voice commands and get in-depth analysis and explanations of what code blocks are supposed to do, generate unit tests, and get suggestions to fix bugs.

Next up, the tool adds support for AI-powered tags in pull request description via a GitHub app that organization admins and individual repository owners can install. GitHub copilot fills out these tags depending on the changes made on code. From this point, developers can make changes as required on the suggested description.

GitHub has further indicated that it is currently testing new capabilities that will redefine how pull requests work. For instance, GitHub Copilot could start sending out automated sentences and paragraphs while developers create pull requests by dynamically pulling in information about code changes. Developers might also get warnings soon when missing sufficient testing for a pull request and get suggestions for the same.

Additionally, GitHub is also launching GitHub Copilot for Docs, a toll that leverages a chat interface to provide users with AI-generated responses to queries revolving around project documentation. At this point, the company will be focusing on documentation for React, Azure Docs, and MDN,

The company’s goal is to incorporate this feature into organisations’ internal documentation, in turn developers will be able to chat interface to make queries about documentation and more.

Acoording to the company’s CEO, Dohmke:

Even though this model was just released, we’re already seeing significant gains in logical reasoning and code generation. With GPT-4, the state of AI is beginning to catch up with our ambition to create an AI pair programmer that assists with every development task at every point in the developer experience.

GitHub has indicated that it intends to work with GPT-4, and that it will continue to work alongside OpenAI to change how developers interact with code by leveraging AI capabilities.

“With AI available at every step, we can fundamentally redefine developer productivity. We are reducing boilerplate and manual tasks and making complex work easier across the developer lifecycle. By doing so, we’re enabling every developer to focus all their creativity on the big picture: building the innovation of tomorrow, accelerating human progress, today,” says Thomas Dohmke, GitHub’s head.