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GitHub Universe was last week and at the keynote, CEO Thomas Dohmke made some provocative statements. To quote the man himself, “Just as GitHub was founded on Git, today we are re-founded on Copilot.” Not sure if you can re-found yourself, but sure, I’ll let that slide.
The core of their refounding is all around Copilot X and how it can assist with all aspects of programming, beyond helping you write code. Copilot Chat is going to be GA in December, and it empowers you to use natural language interactions to set up your initial environment in an IDE.
This is way beyond just suggesting the next few lines of code, and I’ve used it myself to build out a basic framework for a Terraform config. They are adding slash commands to target a particular action, full project scaffolding, and inline chat for specific code blocks. And Copilot Chat is now using GPT-4, so you’re not getting suggestions from two years ago.
There’s also LLM based security scans, the ability to run a private instance of Copilot, and automatic issue remediation with workspaces. The core idea is to make all the non-coding portions of software development use Copilot too. Is this the paradigm shift Dohmke claims? Will Copilot unlock coding for more people and accelerate development? I have to admit I don’t know. But I’m sure Microsoft will make a metric shit-tonne of money off of this regardless. Hooray!