It was only a matter of time until GPT-4 I would jump to Copilotthe tool GitHub designed to suggest and autocomplete code, and it does so in conjunction with copilot x. Is about a new version Developer Wizard that elevates your possibilities to another level. Not only because it incorporates the latest OpenAI artificial intelligence, but also because it adds a ChatGPT-style chatbot with support for text and voice.
Copilot X will no longer only be able to help you program, but it will also be able to answer your questions analyzing the lines of code or the pull requests (change review requests that are often made to other developers), as well as documentation for the software or project you’re working on.
As explained thomas dohmkeCEO of GitHub, Copilot X integrates natively with both the integrated development environment (IDE) visualstudioas to the source code editor VS Code. Something that is not surprising, considering that they are two of the most important tools that Microsoft has developed for those who work in programming.
But that’s not all, Copilot X wants to revolutionize the experience of its users. And its ChatGPT-style tool promises drastically change programmers’ interaction with code.
“GitHub Copilot Chat is not just a chat window. It recognizes what code a developer has written, what error messages are displayed, and is deeply integrated into the IDE. A developer can get detailed analysis and explanations of what blocks of code are intended to do, generate unit tests, and even get proposed fixes for bugs.”
Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub
GPT-4 comes to GitHub with Copilot X
As GitHub explains, much of the Copilot X experience and its new ChatGPT-style chat feature, is building on the foundations of the work that Microsoft has done to integrate the chatbot into Bing. But the other great novelty in this story is the incorporation of GitHub Copilot Voice, a function that, as its name indicates, allows programmers to perform actions using their voice.
As we said at the beginning, Copilot X intends to take advantage of GPT-4 for much more than code hinting. It will also allow an easier understanding of the software on which you work, allowing you to explore its documentation; even if it is limited. But the other great feature in which it intends to get a lot out of it is the pull requests.
What artificial intelligence can do is add auto tags in the descriptions of change review requests that developers make before merging their code into a branch. But GitHub’s idea is to further enhance this function for the future. Later, for example, Copilot X will automatically suggest sentences and paragraphs to programmers when they create new pull requests. And also will generate warnings when it detects that not enough tests were carried out on them.
Finally, GitHub will bring Copilot to the terminal. This will be hand in hand Copilot CLIwhere artificial intelligence will be able to compose commands and loops, among other features.
It is clear that GPT-4 has the potential to transform the work of programmers, and GitHub does not want to waste it. Since its launch, Copilot has been used by more than 1 million developers and has written 46% of the code on the platform. Although it has also been at the center of controversy for “stealing” the work of other developers. It remains to be seen what impact the new Copilot X achieves, but everything points to it taking the experience up a few notches.