Eight months after announcing plans to integrate a conversational interface into its coding assistant, GitHub today made the capability generally available.

The Microsoft Corp. unit’s coding assistant is known as Copilot. The newly launched conversational interface, in turn, is called Copilot Chat. It’s available to individuals and organizations with a paid Copilot subscription, while teachers, students and developers who maintain open-source projects will receive access at no charge.

“Enterprise and organization administrators can grant their development teams access to Copilot Chat by enabling the Copilot Chat setting for their users,” Shuyin Zhao, GitHub’s vice president of product management, detailed in a blog post. “If you’ve been using Copilot Chat in beta or have already provided access to your development team, no additional actions are required.”

GitHub introduced the first iteration of Copilot in June 2021. At the time, the assistant functioned primarily as an autocomplete tool. Developers could start typing a code snippet and have Copilot generate the next few lines automatically.

This past March, GitHub announced plans for a major expansion of Copilot’s capabilities. The centerpiece of the upgrade, which the Microsoft unit called Copilot X, was the addition of a ChatGPT-like conversational interface for interacting with the assistant. That interface became accessible through a limited beta program in July and moved into general availability today as Copilot Chat.

The upgrade enables GitHub’s assistant to not only autocomplete code but also perform a range of other tasks. A novice developer, for example, could ask Copilot Chat to explain a new programming concept. Enterprise software teams, meanwhile, can use the feature to automate time-consuming tasks such as rewriting an existing piece of code in a different programming language.

Copilot Chat also lends itself to application troubleshooting. Using natural language instructions, developers can have the capability scan a code snippet for performance issues and cybersecurity flaws. Furthermore, Copilot Chat is capable of writing unit tests, scripts that automatically evaluate whether a code snippet will work as expected in production.

The capability’s versatility means that it can theoretically complete some programming tasks from start to finish. A developer could have Copilot Chat generate a piece of code, check the code for errors and, after verifying its reliability, write documentation that explains how it works. The chatbot can optionally translate its output into multiple languages. 

The original version of Copilot that debuted in 2021 was based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 large language model. According to GitHub, Copilot Chat is based on the more capable GPT-4 model that debuted this past March. Compared with its predecessor, the latter neural network is significantly more adept at generating code and understanding complex user instructions.

Copilot Chat is available as an extension for Microsoft’s VS Code and Visual Studio programming tools. It also supports JetBrains sro’s popular IntelliJ IDEA application, which competes with Visual Studio. When the extension is enabled, Copilot Chat appears as a sidebar next to the interface panel in which developers write code. 

Image: GitHub