SINGAPORE - GitHub, home to the world’s largest developer community with more than 100 million members, is enlisting users to sign up from April 29 to trial its new Copilot Workspace.
Powered by its generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) bot Copilot, its new solution lets users with basic understanding of software development tap plain language for the whole workflow of developing code.
When given tasks like project descriptions or bug reports, for example, Copilot Workspace generates step-by-step plans complete with code, tests, and documentation.
It helps out through the workflow – from brainstorming, planning and building to testing, running, sharing and filing.
GitHub chief executive Thomas Dohmke expects the application to further raise developer productivity while lowering barriers to software creation, long considered a domain of computer geeks who code in languages like Python and JavaScript.
“We are accelerating to a future where one billion people on GitHub will control a machine just as easily as they ride a bicycle,” he said in the announcement on April 29.
Copilot Workspace is the culmination of GitHub Copilot, which started as an autocomplete code helper in 2022, and upskilled to a chatty real-time assistant called GitHub Copilot Chat in 2023.
Singapore has 1.1 million GitHub users. The community is the fastest growing in the Asia-Pacific, expanding 39 per cent in the 12 months to September, beating even India, which is expected to overtake the United States as the country with the biggest community of software creators by 2027.
Mr Jonathan Carter, head of GitHub Next, said: “Singaporean developers collaborate quite frequently with developers in the US, Hong Kong and China, so it’ll be interesting to see how they use Copilot Workspace to streamline cross-economy collaboration.”
Those who sign up will join the rest of the global users to determine Copilot Workspace’s pricing and capabilities. Enlistment is free and a waitlist can be accessed on its project page.
Mr Carter said it is hard to predict reception, given how different the environment offered by Copilot Workspace is from the way developers work today.
“I’m particularly interested to see how Copilot Workspace can boost collaboration by providing users with automatically-saved versions and context of previous changes.”
He is also curious how developers would use the device-agnostic app on mobile.
“Being able to turn that creativity into code on-the-go through Copilot Workspace on mobile is really exciting,” he said.
Microsoft, which acquired GitHub in 2018, is moving to monetise the open-source platform with products such as Copilot, developed with OpenAI.
As at its latest quarter ended March 2024, GitHub had 1.8 million paid subscribers, a 35 per cent growth over the previous three months.
Reviews for GitHub’s Copilot have been good: Tech research firm Gartner shows 87 per cent of its product reviewers saying they would recommend the app.
A standout complaint was fear of it leading to poorer problem-solving skills and overdependence on automated suggestions among developers, especially the beginners.
In October 2023, when the firm offered a sneak preview at its annual conference, Copilot Workspace could find and fix its own errors.
That talent was killed, said Mr Carter.
“What we realised after conducting more research on developer sentiment around AI agency is that they didn’t want that autofix feature just yet.”
