Universe 2023: Copilot transforms GitHub into the AI-powered developer platform

In March, we shared our vision of a new future of software development with Copilot X, where AI infuses every step of the developer lifecycle. Since then, we’ve been working to scale and mature the underlying technology–and in the process we created something even bigger. Our vision has manifested itself into a new reality for the world’s developers.

Just as GitHub was founded on Git, today we are re-founded on Copilot. Open source and Git have fundamentally transformed how we build software. It is now evident that AI is ushering in the same sweeping change, and at an exponential pace. In just a short period, GitHub Copilot has expanded and evolved GitHub into the world’s leading AI-powered developer platform.

We are certain this foundational transformation of the GitHub platform, and categorically new way of software development, is necessary in a world dependent on software. Every day, the world’s developers balance an unsustainable demand to both modernize the legacy code of yesterday and build our digital tomorrow. It is our guiding conviction to make it easier for developers to do it all, from the creative spark to the commit, pull request, code review, and deploy—and to do it all with GitHub Copilot deeply integrated into the developer experience.

Let’s jump into this new reality.

GitHub Copilot Chat generally available in December 2023

Coding is the centerpiece of the software development lifecycle. With GitHub Copilot Chat we’re enabling the rise of natural language as the new universal programming language for every developer on the planet. Whether it’s finding an error, writing unit tests, or helping debug code, Copilot Chat is your AI companion through it all, allowing you to write and understand code using whatever language you speak.

Copilot Chat will be generally available in December 2023 as part of your existing GitHub Copilot subscription, for organizations and individuals. This offering is also available at no cost to verified teachers, students, and maintainers of popular open source projects.

GitHub Copilot Chat is coming to github.com and our mobile app

GitHub is the place where projects get started, where developers collaborate, and where the open source community builds and maintains the world’s code. Now, we’re integrating GitHub Copilot Chat directly into github.com, so developers can dig into code, pull requests, documentation, and general coding questions with Copilot Chat providing suggestions, summaries, analysis, and answers. And, combined with the power of GitHub’s advanced code search, we are enabling Copilot Chat to understand and help with the latest changes to popular open source projects.

We’re also announcing that Copilot Chat will be available in our best-in-class mobile app, as part of your existing GitHub Copilot subscription. Leveraging the power of natural language, typed or spoken on iPhone and Android devices, developers will get answers to any programming question and about the repositories, files, or documentation they’re viewing in the app. They can get the job done, even when they’re not at their desk.

With Copilot in the code editor, in the CLI, and now Copilot Chat on github.com and in our mobile app, we are making Copilot ubiquitous throughout the software development lifecycle and always available in all of GitHub’s surface areas.

Introducing GitHub Copilot Enterprise: Copilot personalized to your organization

In its early stages as an autocomplete function offered in the IDE, GitHub Copilot was already making developers 55% faster. But developers often write code only around 2 hours a day, and are bogged down with mundane tasks across the software development lifecycle. What’s more, developers spend more time deciphering rather than shipping when they can’t pinpoint and solve the issues, bugs, or vulnerabilities that are unique to an organization’s codebase.

For your team of developers to deploy at the speed and scale that you need to lead in the market, your developers must be empowered with AI at every step of the software development life cycle, customized and fine-tuned to your codebase.

We’re not only sailing past the editor, we are now culminating the entirety of our Copilot offerings and personalizing them with the full context of your entire codebase with GitHub Copilot Enterprise. With Copilot Chat connected to your repositories on github.com, Copilot Enterprise allows your teams of developers to quickly get up to speed on your codebase, search through and build documentation, get suggestions based on internal and private code, and quickly review pull requests. Additionally, smart actions, such as the ability to generate pull request summaries, will be available throughout GitHub helping developers stay in their flow state with the click of a button. And of course, this all comes with enterprise-grade security, safety and privacy.

By placing the collective knowledge of your organization’s codebase at their fingertips, your developers will not only write code faster, but deploy your next application, feature, or update ahead of the curve of your competition. We are thrilled to share that GitHub Copilot Enterprise will be generally available in February 2024 for $39 USD per user per month.

Fostering an ecosystem built on Copilot with the GitHub Copilot Partner Program

Many developers rely on a complex stack of tools and services that hold crucial information about the project they are working on. Today, we are announcing that we will be supercharging GitHub Copilot by integrating it with third-party developer tools, online services, and knowledge outside GitHub. The GitHub Copilot Partner Program will create an ecosystem for new networks and ingenuity to be infused into GitHub Copilot, broadening the expanse of what developers can achieve with AI.

As this ecosystem continues to expand, so will the possibilities and use cases of what GitHub Copilot can accomplish for developers. From helping to improve the performance of database queries, to checking the status of a feature flag, or to viewing the results of an A/B test–all of this and more will soon be possible thanks to the partners who are building plugins for GitHub Copilot.

We are kicking off the first phase of this program with over 25 of our debut partners, including Datastax, LaunchDarkly, Postman, Hashicorp, and Datadog. We look forward to working with current and future partners to scale GitHub Copilot to greater heights.

New AI-powered security features available with GitHub Advanced Security

Today, GitHub Copilot applies an LLM-based vulnerability prevention system that blocks insecure coding patterns in real-time to make GitHub Copilot’s suggestions more secure. Our model targets the most common vulnerable coding patterns, including hardcoded credentials, SQL injections, and path injections.

GitHub Copilot Chat can also help identify security vulnerabilities in the IDE, explain the mechanics of a vulnerability with its natural language capabilities, and suggest a specific fix for the highlighted code. This will radically transform the traditional definition of “shift left.” Now, we’re infusing GitHub Advanced Security with new AI-powered application security testing features designed to detect and remediate vulnerabilities and secrets in your code.

Code scanning autofix suggests AI-generated fixes using CodeQL for JavaScript and TypeScript directly in pull requests, assisting developers in resolving issues faster, and reducing the introduction of new vulnerabilities into codebases. And with AI secret scanning for generic secrets and our new regular expression generator for custom patterns, we’re making it easier to find leaked secrets with low false positives rates.

Combined, these new detection capabilities help you prevent and detect more security vulnerabilities across your organization, keeping your code fortified for the future. These features are available today in preview and will soon be included in your GitHub Advanced Security subscription.

Coming next: GitHub Copilot Workspace

For developers, the greatest barrier often starts at the beginning, with generating the plan it takes to stream an idea into code and all the way to the pull request. Many ideas and bugs begin in a GitHub issue. By combining the details of the issue with the knowledge of the codebase and the reasoning capabilities of GPT-4, our research team at GitHub Next has developed an AI-powered bridge to help every developer scale the barrier of putting an idea into code: we call it the GitHub Copilot Workspace.

When you open an issue in Copilot Workspace, you’re presented with an automatically proposed plan for how to implement the intended change. Because the workspace is fully editable, you’re able to steer the AI in the exact direction you want, while benefiting from its understanding of the issue’s intent, and your entire codebase. To validate that the change behaves as expected, Copilot Workspace enables you to build, run and test the code. And if it encounters an error, it offers to fix it automatically. Copilot Workspace is like a pair programming session with a partner that knows about every inch of the project, and can follow your lead to make repository-wide changes from the issue to the pull request with the power of AI.

Copilot Workspace is an early glimpse of our GitHub Next vision to investigate the future of software development. When Copilot Workspace is delivered in 2024, we will be a consequential leap closer to an age where developers can use AI as a second brain to stream their creativity into creation in minutes, all with natural language.

Bringing it all together in our AI-powered developer platform

The intersection of human and artificial intelligence will continue to define the future generations of GitHub Copilot across our platform. Everything we’re announcing is focused on one thing: bringing a holistic, productive, and seamless AI-powered developer platform to developers—no matter what you’re building.

Whether you’re a startup of five using GitHub Actions to ship your mobile app to the world, a large enterprise of thousands of developers migrating to GitHub Enterprise and GitHub Codespaces to improve innersource collaboration, or a group of open source developers sharing the next piece of digital infrastructure on GitHub—we innovate to empower every developer on the planet to accelerate human progress.

Just like the introduction of Git and the creation of GitHub, this next era will be built on the foundation of GitHub Copilot. And we’re just getting started.

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.