GitHub Copilot Chat – AI Coding Assistant Anywhere in the GitHub Mobile App

GitHub Copilot Chat is a chat interface that let’s you interact directly with GitHub Copilot from within the GitHub Mobile app. It empowers developers to ask and receive answers using an AI that is trained using a combination of natural language processing and machine learning that’s built specifically to help developers be more productive with answering coding related questions. GitHub Copilot Chat can answer a wide range of questions on topics like syntax, programming concepts, test cases, debugging, and other coding-related topics.

GitHub Copilot Chat is available within the GitHub Mobile app

The chat experience of GitHub Copilot Chat is similar to that of ChatGPT, and accessible from within the GitHub Mobile app. The integration of GitHub Copilot as a chat experience directly within the GitHub Mobile app is a great feature choice! This enables developers to use GitHub Copilot from anywhere, so long as they have their smartphone in hand. Sure, accessing GitHub Copilot from within an IDE plugin is useful, but so is being able to access GitHub Copilot from any desk, computer, or location developers find themselves at throughout the work day.

What are the limitations of GitHub Copilot Chat?

GitHub Copilot chat is built to answer coding-related questions. This does limit it’s use as it’s not a general purpose LLM, so don’t expect it to answer non-coding related questions. However, this also means that GitHub Copilot Chat will likely answer coding-related questions better than other more general purpose LLMs; such as ChatGPT. At least this is the goal of GitHub creating their own trained AI for GitHub Copilot.

Just as with any other LLM (large language model), like ChatGPT, you’ll want to verify the responses it gives. It may give incorrect information at times, code that doesn’t compile, or possibly some AI hallucinations. These are not things that are unique to GitHub Copilot Chat, but something that happens with all LLMs.

It helps to take the role of a “lead developer” when asking questions, or submitting prompts, to GitHub Copilot Chat. Explain things clearly and with enough detail so that a junior developer would understand what you’re asking. Talk to GitHub Copilot Chat as if you are talking to another developer. This will help the responses returned to be more accurate and to the point of answering your specific question.

What LLM does GitHub Copilot Chat use?

GitHub Copilot is powered by a generative AI model that was trained and developed by GitHub, OpenAI, and Microsoft. It is trained on all languages that appear in the public repositories hosted on GitHub. With each language it supports, the overall quality of the responses it gives may depend on the volume and diversity of the training data available on that particular language.

Essentially, no GitHub Copilot is not ChatGPT, but something much more custom. With developing the AI in partnership with OpenAI, it’s most likely a custom trained AI based on one of OpenAI’s latest AI models.

How does GitHub Copilot Chat handle offensive content?

This is a major concern since GitHub Copilot Chat trained off of the library of GitHub public repositories, that are all user generated content. As with any user generated content, there is a chance public repositories may contain offensive, biased, discriminatory, or abusive type language. This is not something that would be desired to come out of GitHub Copilot in a response to a question, so GitHub is committed to constantly improving the filter system to intelligently detect and remove offensive suggestions that might get generated by GitHub Copilot.

If you do see an offensive suggestion generated by GitHub Copilot, they do recommend you contact them directly so they can improve the safeguards.

Customize GitHub Copilot with your Organizations codebase

GitHub is also supporting customization of GitHub Copilot with GitHub Copilot Enterprise. This will enable organizations to customize GitHub Copilot based on the context of the organization’s codebase, and this customization extends to GitHub Copilot Chat. With this, developers will be able to directly GitHub Copilot to answer questions targeted at the organizations private repositories. This will help empower development teams to innovate faster within the context of the organizations needs.

How do you enable GitHub Copilot Chat?

GitHub Copilot Chat is available for anyone on GitHub that has Copilot activated on their account. It is a paid feature of GitHub.

You can find more information about billing from GitHub here: https://docs.github.com/en/billing/managing-billing-for-github-copilot

Original Article Source: GitHub Copilot Chat – AI Coding Assistant Anywhere in the GitHub Mobile App written by Chris Pietschmann (If you're reading this somewhere other than Build5Nines.com, it was republished without permission.)