GitHub Copilot can now help you start an AI project, not just complete it

GitHub wants Copilot, its GPT-4-powered code completion platform, to be there throughout the entire development lifecycle, including the start of a coding project.

The company is announcing GitHub Copilot Workspace, a new service that aims to reduce the time engineers and developers spend reading code and figuring out how to start a new project. Workspace will only be available in technical preview for a waitlist of developers, but will be integrated into the larger GitHub Copilot platform after exiting preview.

GitHub wrote in a blog post that Copilot Workspace will be integrated with GitHub repositories or libraries. Developers can describe to Copilot Workspace, through prompts, what they want to do in the project. Copilot Workspace will offer suggestions on how to get started and provide a step-by-step process. Users can edit the suggestions and, when they are satisfied with them, run the code (or even use Copilot to help complete the code) and finalize the project.

GitHub’s next head, Jonathan Carter, tells On the edge They’ve heard from customers how Copilot has been helpful in the middle of a project, but not as helpful at the beginning. But adding Copilot right at the start of a project allows developers to spend more time coding rather than reading the code and documentation around it to figure out how to get started.

Carter says Copilot Workspace is useful for reviewing older code because it can scan the codebase and understand how it works faster than humans can read written documentation explaining it.

Since GitHub’s release of writing and completing the Copilot code, it has become ubiquitous and a common benchmarking skill for new AI models. Most lightweight templates, or templates with a more limited skill set, are optimized for simple tasks such as summarization, writing tasks, and code completion. GitHub’s parent company, Microsoft, has released a small model capable of code writing tasks called Phi-3. Companies like Meta have also released versions of their great language models for coding projects.