GitHub Copilot Enterprise, an AI coding assistant aimed at developers at large organizations, has now reached general availability, featuring chat tools customized to a company's codebase, plus documentation search and pull request summaries.
By connecting Copilot Chat to repositories on GitHub, Copilot Enterprise allows developers to quickly get up to speed with the corporate codebase, find and create documentation, get suggestions based on internal and private code, and quickly review pull requests, the company said .
This is the third version of the coding copilot to arrive. The first version of GitHub Copilot became generally available in June 2022 after a technical preview the previous year. In February 2023, GitHub Copilot for Business arrived, adding more powerful AI models and additional security to filter out unsafe code suggestions.
More than 50,000 organizations are now using GitHub Copilot in some way, the company said.
The launch of GitHub Copilot Enterprise comes in direct response to customer requests for custom tools for their organization's code and processes, according to CEO Thomas Dohmke.
The inaccessibility of institutional knowledge acts as a block that prevents developers from exercising their creativity and building more, he said.
“Developers spend more time decrypting than shipping when they can't identify and resolve issues, bugs, or vulnerabilities that are unique to their organization's codebase,” Dohmke said.
“What's more, developers often write code for only a couple of hours a day and, instead of being creative, they get bogged down with mundane tasks all day long.”
Dohmke said his latest co-pilot will dramatically improve productivity and knowledge-sharing capabilities for developers.
“Now, team members can ask questions about public and private code, quickly get up to speed with new code bases, create greater consistency across engineering teams, and ensure everyone has access to the same standards and work they've been working on.” done previously,” he said. .
GitHub said the new co-pilot version can help modernize outdated codebases by offering clear code summaries, relevant suggestions, and quick responses to queries about code behavior.
By integrating chat directly into GitHub.com, it allows developers to ask questions and receive answers in natural language about the organization's codebase, and guide them to relevant documentation or existing options.
“This can facilitate rapid iteration at scale while also improving code with personalized support and suggestions tailored to an organization's specific code base and standards,” Dohmke said.
Copilot Enterprise presents pull request summaries that should save developers time, and because it can analyze pull request differences, reviewers can save time understanding changes.
GitHub said it is also integrating Bing search directly into Copilot Chat, which is available in beta for GitHub Copilot Enterprise, allowing developers to find the latest information related to software development, such as CSS framework updates or JavaScript.
The company said it does not use any of an organization's private repositories or prompts and suggestions to train the machine learning models that power its products “unless you expressly direct us to do so, for example with custom models.”
What are developers saying about GitHub Copilot Enterprise so far?
GitHub launched Copilot Enterprise with some feedback from early adopters, most of whom believe the tool has noticeably improved productivity.
Tommy MacWilliam, infrastructure engineering manager at software company Figma, said Copilot Enterprise has improved collaboration throughout its software development lifecycle by making it easier for its engineers to obtain and find information through Copilot. Chat.
“We are also seeing a significant increase in overall developer productivity. “Our engineers code faster, collaborate more effectively, and deliver better results,” he said.
Meanwhile, Mark Côté, head of developer infrastructure at Shopify, said the company's developers already accept 24,000 lines of code every day with Copilot.
Côté added that with Copilot Enterprise, Copilot Chat offers personalized recommendations for its developers, “making it easier for developers to quickly understand the context.”
Copilot Individual, Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise: What's the difference?
There are now three different GitHub Copilot offerings, differentiated by feature set and price.
Copilot Individual, for example, is aimed at independent developers and freelancers for $10 a month (it's free for students, teachers, and maintainers of popular open source projects).
This version offers code completion and chat.
Meanwhile, Copilot Business, which costs $19 per user per month, adds more features including command line support, security, and intellectual property compensation.
Copilot Enterprise has all of this and, for $39 per user per month, adds personalized chat to the enterprise codebase, documentation search and summaries, pull request summaries, and code review abilities. IT requires GitHub Enterprise Cloud.
How do I get GitHub Copilot Enterprise?
For developers, once you are assigned a GitHub Copilot Enterprise seat, you will automatically see Copilot in the GitHub Enterprise and GitHub Mobile interfaces.
GitHub said these will be indicated by chat buttons and smart actions.
For IDE-based capabilities, you must install the GitHub Copilot extension specific to your IDE. And if you want to use Copilot on the command line, use GitHub CLI in your terminal and install Copilot in the CLI extension.
