GitHub Copilot Chat available in a preview for businesses

GitHub has made a limited public beta release of GitHub Copilot Chat available to all customers of GitHub Copilot for Business, giving these users a context-aware, conversational programming assistant within their Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code development environments.

Previously, GitHub Copilot Chat was available only through a private, gated beta program. Coplot Chat provides context-specific, real-time coding assistance, including:

• Guidance such as best practices, tips, and solutions tailored to specific coding challenges.
• Code analysis, breaking down complex concepts and explaining code suggestions. Complex concepts can be broken down and code snippets explained.
• Troubleshooting, identifying issues, offering suggestions, explanations, and alternative approaches.
• Suggested remediations for security issues in code.

GitHub Copilot for Business users can sign up for the beta at github.com. Users are able to use the beta via Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio extensions. Developers with GitHub Copilot Chat will be able to execute complex tasks with simple prompts, according to GitHub.

Announced July 20, the wider beta serves as a first step in bringing GitHub Copilot X to enterprises, featuring technical previews of generative AI and GPT-4 for developers. GitHub Copilot Chat goes beyond being a chat window, GitHub said. It is contextually aware of the code the developer has typed and any error messages that are displayed by the IDE.

Microsoft previously previewed Copilot Chat for GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code. GitHub Copilot has raised concerns and a lawsuit regarding the fairness and legality of its use of publicly available code. The technology has been trained on billions of lines of code and has been used all over the world, GitHub has said.