GitHub’s tenth edition of its flagship developer conference, GitHub Universe 24, introduced several new feature additions to the GitHub Copilot Workspace—a collaborative environment within GitHub that helps developers use natural language to generate a structured plan based on the specifications of an issue, and seamlessly create a pull request. Copilot Workspace also leverages generative AI capabilities to assist in coding, allowing teams to iterate on their code effectively, and make changes across all the files in a repository.
GitHub revealed that over 55,000 developers have used Copilot Workspace to plan, build, test, and run code using natural language, with over 10,000 pull requests merged.
The Developer Environment of The Future
Over the last six months, GitHub has released over 100 new additions to the Copilot Workspace, repeatedly suggesting that it is the ‘developer environment of the future’. The newly announced build and error repair feature suggests potential solutions to code errors and provides an option to fix the code manually or let Copilot Workspace rectify it automatically.
GitHub also introduced new enhancements to the Brainstorming Mode in Copilot Workspace. This mode lets users collaborate and explore all the repositories, suggest solutions for issues, ask questions and help improve the overall problem-solving process.
With the latest update, it can now automatically provide structure and organisation to a list of tasks and automatically update it when new questions are added. Moreover, GitHub also revealed that Brainstorming mode could derive context from multiple external sources.
Another newly added feature, follow-up, helps users automatically update the project. Copilot Workspace implements all necessary changes across the codebase that are complete when a task impacts multiple files. GitHub also announced that Copilot Workspace can now be used directly in the context of Pull Requests, letting developers easily implement code changes and suggestions.
A few days ago, GitHub introduced an AI vision feature that lets developers add image-based context to resolve issues. Users can add diagrams, screenshots, mockups, or photos, letting the AI model analyse the information inside the image.
That said, the one game-changing update from GitHub Universe 24’ that can significantly impact Copilot Workspace is the integration of Claude, which is widely deemed the best foundational model for writing code.
GitHub Copilot Workspace Has Hired the Best Coder in Town – Claude!
Until today, GitHub’s Copilot was capable of writing code only using OpenAI’s GPT models. Now, developers can choose from OpenAI’s models and other industry-leading models, including Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
When developers approve suggestions from Copilot Workspace, it can automatically write code based on the generated plan. Using Claude to do so is nothing short of a game changer since it has been established that OpenAI’s models aren’t up to the mark when writing code. AIM compared multiple large language models (LLMs) for coding completion tests on LiveBench, and the results showed Claude 3.5 Sonnet on top.
“In 2024, we experienced a boom in high-quality large and small language models that each individually excel at different programming tasks. There is no one model to rule every scenario, and developers expect the agency to build with the models that work best for them,” said GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke.
The new features align with the relationship GitHub Copilot Workspace has always wanted to establish with a developer. Copilot Workspace isn’t primarily focused on automatically generating code based on a single prompt or idea. It’s more than just a tool that auto-completes code—it focuses on assisting developers with a comprehensive plan of tasks before they generate a pull request.
While several competitors exist in today’s AI ‘code companion’ market, one of GitHub’s advantages is that Copilot Workspace directly integrates into GitHub, which already boasts over 100 million developers and more than 420 million repositories.
The new additions to GitHub Copilot and its newfound multimodel advantage threaten existing platforms like Cursor. In a podcast episode with Lex Fridman, Aman Sageer, co-founder of Cursor, said, “I think the Cursor a year from now will need to make the Cursor of today look obsolete.” This indicates if Cursor is to stay relevant in the competition, it has to pull its socks up.
“You can wax poetic about moats and brand that, and this is our advantage, but I think in the end, just if you stop innovating on the product, you will lose,” said Micheal Truel, a co-founder of Cursor. It’ll be interesting to see how Cursor responds, and how the competition will evolve.
From an Indian perspective, GitHub Copilot Workspace has the potential to enhance the workflow of more than 17 million developers – and as per 2024 GitHub’s Octaverse report, India is the fastest-growing developer community in the world. Moreover, the Indian developer community isn’t shying away from using AI to code, and as Thomas Dohmke says, “India’s booming developer community is using AI to build AI in record numbers, making it evermore likely that the next great multinational will come from India”.
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