Businesses can now preview GitHub Copilot Chat

GitHub launched Copilot X, a code-centric chatbot, earlier this year to expand its Copilot code completion tool. Copilot Chat is now a limited public beta for all GitHub business users on Visual Studio and VS Code.

“This new evolution turns GitHub Copilot into a context-aware conversational assistant right in the IDE, allowing developers to execute some of the most complex tasks with simple prompts,” GitHub’s Mario Rodriguez writes in today’s announcement. “Every developer on your team, from the least to the most experienced, will be able to build entire applications or debug vast arrays of code in minutes instead of days.”

Copilot Chat is a chatbot that knows the context of your code. Powered by GPT-4, Copilot Chat can go beyond what a more general-purpose generative AI chat assistant can do while keeping developers in the flow. “We’re taking what works for general purpose and making it contextually aware of a developer’s environment,” Rodriguez says.

Copilot Chat can help developers with security issues, code analysis, and coding questions.

Last month, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke told me that businesses were clamoring for Chat’s private preview. “Compared to when we launched Copilot in preview two years ago, we are on a much faster track where companies are saying ‘we want not only Copilot but Copilot X. We’re surprised by the number of companies willing to sign up for the preview terms, which are softer than the regular terms, and say “no, we don’t want to wait a few months.” Chat now!”