GitHub Copilot Workspace: Welcome to the Copilot-native developer environment

In the past two years, generative AI has foundationally changed the developer landscape largely as a tool embedded inside the developer environment. In 2022, we launched GitHub Copilot as an autocomplete pair programmer in the editor, boosting developer productivity by up to 55%. Copilot is now the most widely adopted AI developer tool. In 2023, we released GitHub Copilot Chat—unlocking the power of natural language in coding, debugging, and testing—allowing developers to converse with their code in real time.

After sharing an early glimpse at GitHub Universe last year, today, we are reimagining the nature of the developer experience itself with the technical preview of GitHub Copilot Workspace: the Copilot-native developer environment. Within Copilot Workspace, developers can now brainstorm, plan, build, test, and run code in natural language. This new task-centric experience leverages different Copilot-powered agents from start to finish, while giving developers full control over every step of the process.

Copilot Workspace represents a radically new way of building software with natural language, and is expressly designed to deliver–not replace–developer creativity, faster and easier than ever before. With Copilot Workspace we will empower more experienced developers to operate as systems thinkers, and materially lower the barrier of entry for who can build software.

Welcome to the first day of a new developer environment. Here’s how it works:

It all starts with the task…

For developers, the greatest barrier to entry is almost always at the beginning. Think of how often you hit a wall in the first steps of a big project, feature request, or even bug report, simply because you don’t know how to get started. GitHub Copilot Workspace meets developers right at the origin: a GitHub Repository or a GitHub Issue. By leveraging Copilot agents as a second brain, developers will have AI assistance from the very beginning of an idea.

…Workspace builds the full plan

From there, Copilot Workspace offers a step-by-step plan to solve the issue based on its deep understanding of the codebase, issue replies, and more. It gives you everything you need to validate the plan, and test the code, in one streamlined list in natural language.

And it’s entirely editable…

Everything that GitHub Copilot Workspace proposes—from the plan to the code—is fully editable, allowing you to iterate until you’re confident in the path ahead. You retain all of the autonomy, while Copilot Workspace lifts your cognitive strain.

And once you’re satisfied with the plan, you can run your code directly in Copilot Workspace, jump into the underlying GitHub Codespace, and tweak all code changes until you are happy with the final result. You can also instantly share a workspace with your team via a link, so they can view your work and even try out their own iterations.

All that’s left then is to file your pull request, run your GitHub Actions, security code scanning, and ask your team members for human code review. And best of all, they can leverage your Copilot Workspace to see how you got from idea to code.

Also: GitHub Copilot Workspace is mobile compatible

And because ideas can happen anywhere, GitHub Copilot Workspace was designed to be used from any device—empowering a real-world development environment that can work on a desktop, laptop, or on the go.

This is our mark on the future of the development environment: an intuitive, Copilot-powered infrastructure that makes it easier to get started, to learn, and ultimately to execute.

Enabling a world with 1B developers

Early last year, GitHub celebrated over 100 million developers on our platform—and counting. As programming in natural language lowers the barrier of entry to who can build software, we are accelerating to a near future where one billion people on GitHub will control a machine just as easily as they ride a bicycle. We’ve constructed GitHub Copilot Workspace in pursuit of this horizon, as a conduit to help extend the economic opportunity and joy of building software to every human on the planet.

At the same time, we live in a world dependent on—and in short supply of—professional developers. Around the world, developers add millions of lines of code every single day to evermore complex systems and are increasingly behind on maintaining the old ones. Just like any infrastructure in this world, we need real experts to maintain and renew the world’s code. By quantifiably reducing boilerplate work, we will empower professional developers to increasingly operate as systems thinkers. We believe the step change in productivity gains that professional developers will experience by virtue of Copilot and now Copilot Workspace will only continue to increase labor demand.

That’s the dual potential of GitHub Copilot: for the professional and hobbyist developer alike, channeling creativity into code just got a whole lot easier.

Written by

Thomas Dohmke

@ashtom

Fascinated by software development since his childhood in Germany, Thomas Dohmke has built a career building tools developers love and accelerating innovations that are changing software development. Currently, Thomas is Chief Executive Officer of GitHub, where he has overseen the launch of the world's first at-scale AI developer tool, GitHub Copilot -- and now, GitHub Copilot X. Before his time at GitHub, Thomas previously co-founded HockeyApp and led the company as CEO through its acquisition by Microsoft in 2014, and holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from University of Glasgow, UK.