copilot

This week, GitHub Copilot brings you a new interactive experience with chat in Visual Studio, several updates to the chat experience in Visual Studio Code, and the arrival of an expanded context window.

Stay in the flow with Interactive Code Assistant View in Visual Studio

With the Interactive Code Assistant view, you can now refine code with Copilot Chat directly within your editor window – no need to switch to a chat window! Simply use “Ask Copilot” in your code to ask questions and view inline answers. Copilot’s code suggestions appear side by side with your code, following the Visual Studio diff view pattern. This lets you review, correct, and refine suggestions at your own pace before applying changes. Throughout the process, you remain in control. To learn more about chat in Visual Studio, head to the latest blog.

Updated /slash commands, Quick Chat improvements, and expanded context in the 1.81 release of Visual Studio Code

Save time with slash command improvements

Forget deleting commands one letter at a time. With the latest update, commands now render as blocks and can be deleted with a single backspace! We’ll also automatically execute slash commands like /clear and /help when they’re selected from the suggestion list, removing the need to explicitly submit the chat request after accepting a completion.

Updated Quick Chat experience

Prefer an ephemeral chat experience instead of a panel or in-editor one? Quickly activate this view with Shift + Cmd/Ctrl + I. In this update, we’ve added conversation history and support for slash command completion to bring it closer to our other chat experiences.

Expanded context to include the terminal

Copilot chat context now extends beyond code files, taking in the active terminal’s buffer and selection to better inform its responses.

To learn more about updates to the Visual Studio Code experience, check out the full release notes.

Expanding Copilot’s context window to 8k

We’ve officially rolled out the 8k context window for all code completion requests! 🥳 With this change, Copilot has greater flexibility to include additional information as part of requests and ultimately improve the suggestions you receive!

Questions, suggestions, or ideas?

Join the conversation in the Copilot community discussion. We’d love to hear from you!

Today's update brings the ability to set an allowlist for languages within the IntelliJ extension, quickly switch to an annual GitHub Copilot for Individuals plan, and the private preview of code referencing.

Select languages setting within IntelliJ

The previous disabledLanguages configuration is replaced with a new, more flexible languageAllowList configuration. This change allows enabling or disabling all languages at once using the * wildcard.

github-copilot.xml location

The github-copilot.xml file is located at

~/Library/Application Support/JetBrains/<IDE+VERSION>/options/github-copilot.xml

For example the path to github-copilot.xml for IntelliJ version 2022.3 is

~/Library/Application Support/JetBrains/IntelliJIdea2022.3/options/github-copilot.xml

github-copilot.xml for enabling all languages (default behavior)

<application>
  <component name="github-copilot">
    <languageAllowList>
      <map>
        <entry key="*" value="true" />
      </map>
    </languageAllowList>
  </component>
</application>

You can now specify an individual language override if your configuration also includes a wildcard.

github-copilot.xml for disabling all languages except for Kotlin and Java

<application>
  <component name="github-copilot">
    <languageAllowList>
      <map>
        <entry key="*" value="false" />
        <entry key="kotlin" value="true" />
        <entry key="java" value="true" />
      </map>
    </languageAllowList>
  </component>
</application>

A new hidden languageAllowListReadOnly configuration property has been added that makes languageAllowList readonly in the UI.

github-copilot.xml for making the UI setting readonly and enabling all languages

<application>
  <component name="github-copilot">
    <option name="languageAllowListReadOnly" value="true" />
    <languageAllowList>
      <map>
        <entry key="*" value="true" />
      </map>
    </languageAllowList>
  </component>
</application>

An easier way manage your Copilot for Individuals trial and plan

We've heard confusion from users on how to switch between monthly and annual billing. We want you to feel fully in control of your GitHub Copilot plan so we've updated the Plans and Usage page to make it easier to swap between your plan options. Just head down to the Copilot plan section and hit the Manage subscription button to see your options.

We've also added the option to activate your Copilot trial directly from this page and while we'd hate to see you go, if you find that Copilot isn't for you during your trial, you can quickly cancel it before it converts into a paid plan.

Try out code referencing [Private Beta]!

Last week, we announced our private beta for code referencing in Copilot. Learn more by heading to our blog post or join the waitlist today!

Questions, suggestions, or ideas?

Join the conversation in the Copilot community discussion. We'd love to hear from you!

We continue our momentum with new capabilities for administrators and many improvements to Chat in our Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio extensions.

🤖 Automate GitHub Copilot access for your organization with User Management API (beta)

Note: This API is in Beta and is subject to change based on feedback.

Since the availability of GitHub Copilot for Business, we’ve heard feedback that assigning GitHub Copilot licenses to large sets of users through the UI can be tedious and time-consuming, particularly if you need to leverage Teams for your permissions management. Additionally, there has yet to be a way to routinely collect a list of stale users and revoke their access – forcing admins to spend precious time reviewing page after page of users’ last activity date and individually pruning access.

With the new User Management API for Copilot for Business, admins can list all Copilot-enabled organization members with their details and add/remove access for individuals and teams. This allows them to automate access at scale, fitting the company’s process and needs. Be sure to authenticate using an access token with the new manage_billing:copilot scope to get started.

Check out our documentation to try it out today and leave feedback for us in our Discussion post!

✍️ New Create commands in Visual Studio Code 1.80

To help you create projects and notebooks and search for text in your workspace, we have introduced preview-only slash commands in the Chat view.

Note: To get access to the Chat view, inline chat, and slash commands (for example /search, /createWorkspace), sign up for the GitHub Copilot chat waitlist and install the Pre-Release version of the GitHub Copilot extension.

Create workspaces

You can ask Copilot to create workspaces for popular project types with the /createWorkspace slash command. Copilot will first generate a directory structure for your request.

You can then use the Create Workspace button to create and open the project directory as a new workspace.

Create notebooks

You can ask Copilot to create Jupyter notebooks based on your requirements with the /createNotebook slash command. Copilot will generate an outline of the notebook based on your needs.

You can then use the Create Notebook command to create the notebook and fill in the code cells based on the suggested outline.

Visual Studio extension improvements

• Better support for other programming languages – We have improved the quality of the results of questions for XAML, Blazor, C++, etc.
• Save & Restore chat history – This prevents the user from losing the discussion/chat whenever they close Visual Studio. It is now persisted and restored.
• Clear chat history – added the ability to clear the chat history so context from previous conversations is not considered in the prompt and answer by Copilot.
• Multiline prompt box – We improved the prompt input to allow users to ask more extended questions easily.
• Streaming support for displaying content in the Chat tool window – We have added streaming support to all chat experiences.
• Specific insertions for test generation – Test generation sometimes requires insertion into separate files or projects. We now support special handling through action buttons in the chat window.
• Quality of life updates – better context, UI refresh, and error messages throughout the Chat experiences.

Context-aware actions shown based on embeddings

We are introducing context-aware actions like documentation, explanation, and generating tests. These actions take the existing inline context and craft specific intents to provide an optimal and magical experience on those tasks.

Analyze method with GitHub Copilot in CPU usage tool

When triggered, Copilot Chat will explain why the issue occurred and suggest a fix. These show up in the diagnostics experience. These require using preview versions of Visual Studio.

To learn more about Copilot and take full advantage of all of its power, visit our YouTube Copilot playlist. To sign up, see our Copilot features page.

With GitHub Copilot being used by over 20K organizations 🎉 and the increased momentum of our Chat functionality, we wanted to take this opportunity to highlight recent updates and ships.

GitHub Copilot Chat (Visual Studio Code)

Note: To get access to the new chat-based GitHub Copilot features, you’ll need to sign up for the GitHub Copilot chat waitlist.

The GitHub Copilot Chat extension graduated from Insiders into Stable with the release of Visual Studio Code v1.79. Highlights include:
– Improvements to editor chat, most notably we have changed its default mode to be “livePreview”. In this mode, changes are applied directly to the document and shown with an embedded diff view.
– When using Copilot in a notebook document, Copilot can use the notebook context to provide more relevant suggestions.
– When running notebook cells, Copilot provides suggestions for cell execution failures.
– When viewing a review thread, it is now possible to directly apply a review comment using Copilot.
– An experiment using chat to ask quick programming questions without leaving context.
– You can now delete a chat request/response pair by clicking the X icon in the chat request.
– Added the ability to move chat sessions back and forth between the sidebar and editor.

For previous updates, reference the Insiders April 2023 (v1.78) release notes.

To learn more about GitHub Copilot as well as tips and tricks and best practices, have a look at the VS Code YouTube channel. There you’ll find an introduction to GitHub Copilot, language-specific usage, and guidance on effective prompting when using Copilot for development.

Copilot with your debugger (Visual Studio)

Copilot Chat in Visual Studio helps you figure out how to fix issues when you’ve hit an exception. Just hit the link in the exception dialog to see an explanation of the exception together with likely causes and suggested code solutions to fix the problem inline. Copilot gathers the data about your exception, code, and variable values to help form an exact question and get you a great answer. Combine that with the power of features like Hot Reload, and you can test out the suggested change and be on your way much faster.

Visual Studio’s IntelliSense list can now steer GitHub Copilot code completions

GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio’s built-in AI assistance features are now better together. With the latest release (version 1.84+), Copilot predictions are not only visible when IntelliSense is open, but your IntelliSense selection also steers the prediction offered by Copilot. This helps you explore and get just the code completion you want. It’s particularly helpful with the starred completions that Visual Studio’s built-in IntelliCode AI provides with member ranking in the IntelliSense list.

Code completion improvements

• GitHub Copilot is now even more powerful and responsive for developers, thanks to a new model powered by GPT-3.5 Turbo through the collaboration across OpenAI, Azure AI, and GitHub that offers 13% latency improvements.
• Code completion uses an 8k context window that improves suggestions and acceptance rates.

Bug fixes and improvements

• Added the ability to export a CSV of all users for an org. From the seat management page, you can export a flat list of all your users – helping address a significant pain point for our admins who want to avoid scrolling through page after page and want better insight into who within a Team is using Copilot.
• We updated the Copilot signup flow to make signing up for a GitHub account AND Copilot in one fluid experience easier.
• France is our newest region serving Copilot code completion requests, improving latency for European customers. This is in addition to our existing Switzerland presence.
• In Visual Studio, we added the ability to preview code insertions back into your code using the same grey text approach we use for code completions.
• In Visual Studio, you can now delete chat requests

Today, we’re officially releasing GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer that suggests code in your editor, to all developers for $10 USD/month or $100 USD/year.

To show our appreciation to the Open Source and Learning communities, it will also be free to use for verified students and maintainers for popular open source project on GitHub.

Also thanks to users who are already in the technical preview program. You can continue enjoy free access until August 22nd.

Learn more in the GitHub CEO’s blog