GitHub has announced that its Copilot Chat beta is now available to all GitHub Copilot users for free. The feature works with Visual Studio and VS Code. To give you a quick recap, Copilot for individual users costs $10 every month whereas Business users have to shell out $19 per month. Similar to how Bing is placed in Edge, Copilot Chat is placed in a sidebar in the IDE and enables users to learn new languages, and frameworks and fix bugs without having to leave the IDE. You can also get answers to coding questions in simple and natural language. In a recent blog post, GitHub says Copilot Chat can also help understand complex concepts by breaking them down and explain pieces of code. It also suggests best practices and solutions approach a coding challenge in real time. Users who are stuck trying to debug a code can also take the help of Copilot Chat to identify issues, get explanation or suggestions or go with an alternate approach. Some of the existing Copilot Chat capabilities include the ability to fix security loopholes and offer code analysis. "By reducing the need for context switching, it streamlines the development process, which helps developers maintain their focus and momentum." said GitHub. "We believe this cohesion will form the new centerpiece of the software development experience, fundamentally reducing boilerplate work and designating natural language as a new universal programming language for every developer on the planet," the company added. GitHub first introduced its generative AI-powered developer tool - Copilot back in 2021. Powered by GPT-4, the tool can understand the context of code written by developers to generate new lines and tests and even help with complex algorithms and functions.
