In July this year, GitHub, a software developer service owned by Microsoft, launched a limited-function beta version of the GitHubCopilotChat chatbot. In September, the beta became available to all individual developers on GitHub. Later, GitHub revealed that the feature would be fully launched in December.
Just a few days before New Year's Eve, GitHub CopilotChat finally entered the fully available stage. The service can be accessed by both individual users and organizations through all of GitHub's paid plans, and supports Visual Studio Code and the Visual Studio development environment, the company said in a blog post.
In addition to paid plans, GitHub CopilotChat is now available for free to certified teachers, students, and creators of popular open source projects.
GitHubCopilotChat is powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model. Like other chatbots, it's designed to let users enter text prompts to answer questions or even generate code for software projects.
GitHub's support page provides more information about what the chatbot can and cannot do. For example, GitHub CopilotChat can help explain the code in a project to developers and suggest improvements. It can also generate programming snippets based on code in the software editor or code highlighted by the developer.
Chatbots can also find bugs in developer code and suggest fixes. The chatbot can also answer any questions developers have about coding, fixes, and more.
GitHub also pointed out some limitations of CopilotChat. For example, it may be less proficient in less commonly used coding languages and structures. Additionally, if you just want to ask GitHubCopilotChat a non-coding-related question or topic, you'll find that it may give "irrelevant or meaningless" answers, or not answer such questions at all.