On March 22, 2023 – GitHub (a popular code hosting platform that enables collaboration and coalition between programmers from anywhere in the world and allows them to improve their projects) just introduced GITHUB COPILOTX – which would be a next-gen coding assisting powered by AI.
We are currently living through an AI inflection point where AI-powered tools are slowly becoming better and better at automating our jobs, that may make a lot of programmers and developers a bit pessimistic about their future but it is what it is and AI is here to stay, so we better make the most of this tool and only use it to enhance our own capacity rather than ignoring it and pretending it won’t take over.
COPILOT X’S FEATURES
BUILT-IN CHAT WINDOW
Github CopilotX would be having a built-in chat window which is very similar to Chatgpt, the only difference is that it is optimized especially for coding problems
- You can highlight some code and ask the chat window to explain what the code is intended to do.
- You can rectify selected code, not only getting the mistakes in the current code but a modified and correct version of the code as well.
- You can also test that specific fragment of your code easily.
- You can prompt Copilot X’s chat window up to 25,000 words at a time.
TAILORED DOCUMENTATION
Instead of going through the entire documentation of a specific library to get what you want, Github CopilotX would allow you to know all you need according to your search query in a very simplified and less sophisticated manner, consider this as a search engine for specifically searching within complex documentations
- You can either tell what you need and a response would guide you step by step much like Stackoverflow.
- Or you can simply forward your queries regarding libraries or fragments of those libraries.
Github CopilotX is going to integrate documentation for React, Azure, and MDN for now!
Voice commands
This indeed is a very exciting feature, Github CopilotX would be allowing its users to command IDE’s entirely through voice, which would make the entire programming process so much faster and healthier, instead of sitting in front of your screens typing continuously to get specified results, now it is much easier to prompt IDEs like VS code to write while we speak, not to mention how speed and efficiency of the process would be greatly enhanced allowing us to build complex applications 10 times faster.
AUTOMATED PULL REQUESTS
Pull requests allow programmers to collaborate through the GitHub project to improve and merge code, you can simply improve the code that you like and send a pull request to the original creator to merge your code based on what improvements you’ve made
Github CopilotX is providing a unique feature that would allow you or help you to write better pull requests based on the changes you’ve made. It’s all AI-powered, with high accuracy, and short and to-the-point sentences would greatly enhance our collaboration experience while also saving us a lot of time.
AI – TEXT COMPLETION
This feature is specifically focused on the command line, we always stress the fact that we have to remember complex commands for implementing our desired changes and Copilot X is going to solve this problem, you just have to prompt it in plain English that what you want to do and it would simply execute the code for it while explaining it to you as well, which is a much better alternative to googling and browsing StackOverflow for such tasks.
END NOTE
As interesting and exciting as these copilot features sound they also are sending shivers down the programmers since most programmers would now think that their skill is becoming worthless day by day with all these new features but let me tell you one thing to understand and use these features you still need to be a programmer, these tools like CHATGPT 3.5, 4.0, Google Bard, and finally, Github CopilotX are only created to improve your productivity, equipped with these tools, the future programmers would be able to build thing 10 times faster and with lesser complexities of remembering code and structures of different language, therefore we must embrace these tools and embrace the time we are living in as this is truly the golden age of programming!