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GitHub has revealed Copilot Workspace, its AI-native developer environment. Using natural language, developers can brainstorm, plan, build, test and run code faster and easier than before. First teased in 2023 at its user conference, GitHub Copilot Workspace is now available in technical preview and interested developers can sign up for the waitlist.
Copilot versus Copilot Workspace
But wait, GitHub launched a coding assistant in 2021, so what’s the difference between Copilot and Copilot Workspace? According to Jonathan Carter, the head of the company’s GitHub Next applied research and development team, the former helps complete a thought already started and can help synthesize code in a single file at your cursor. Copilot can also reduce boilerplate and context-switching. It’s credited as having helped transform the coding industry. However, Carter says it has natural limitations “as a side effect of the user experience it provides.”
“The original GitHub Copilot helped to represent one of the first examples of a real-world application of AI. Not a demo. Not hype. Everybody had to admit it was very useful,” he tells VentureBeat. “That was a big moment for the industry and developers to see the potential and the untapped potential that could happen beyond that.”
In the three years since its launch, GitHub has made multiple improvements to Copilot, including upgrading its code suggestions and adding a multi-model approach, supporting OpenAI’s GPT-4 model and launching an enterprise plan.
On the other hand, the latter “operates at a higher altitude of complexity while still supporting the developer,” meaning it’s task-centric and fundamentally tries to reduce the friction needed to start a task.
“When you look at Workspace, we’re not trying to go after an autonomous agent that replaces developers,” he asserts. “We’re trying to empower developers by providing them an AI-native tool to be more creative [and] more expressive.”
Remember when you were given a blank canvas with powerful tools and asked to create something from scratch—and your mind blanks? GitHub expects Copilot Workspace to remove some of the stress developers experience when coding.
“We think it represents a big leap forward, certainly in the exploration of what might developer environments look like that are truly AI native instead of adding extensions to existing editors or IDEs. What if we rethought development in a way that assumed AI was part of it from the beginning all the way to completion, with the developer in the loop along the way?” Carter explains.
GitHub is not alone in leveraging AI to help developers code. The Microsoft-owned company faces competition from Google, the open-source community, and startups like Augment and Cognition.
The impact on enterprise developers
Greater productivity and job satisfaction will likely be the greatest benefits this new offering will provide enterprise developers. GitHub thinks that the more affordable it is to explore and try different ideas while reducing the implementation time, the more organizations will behave like smaller companies.
Carter also argues that once a structured developer environment exists that models a workflow in a specific and opinionated way, it’ll help with the standardization of skills across teams. This means there will be more paved paths within the enterprise, and companies won’t need to devote as many resources towards growing teams and upskilling workers.
“If we’re able to make the level of impact that we want with Workspace where the way that a developer on the team starts an issue, works and brainstorms their way through it, shares feedback, and then [completes the project], the moment that looks cohesive and similar across whichever type of issue or work you’re doing, that then has those benefits for providing enterprises with a bit more standardization,” Carter claims.
He postulates that there are benefits to having teams codify their guidance and best practices so that GitHub’s Copilot Workspace can integrate into its AI and automatically execute them in code without a developer having to remember it. Though not available today, it could be added in the future.
What can Copilot Workspace do?
Carter touts that this native developer environment is designed to tackle “everyday tasks,” meaning it can help create new repos, iterate on tasks, and iterate on pull requests. These are among the most frequent things developers do.
That said, GitHub Copilot Workspace has four key features: editability at all levels, an integrated terminal featuring secure port forwarding, collaborative functionality, and an optimized mobile experience.
Editability
Everything that GitHub’s AI proposes can be modified anytime, from the plan to the code. The company stresses that developers remain in control at all times. “We believe deeply that the combination of human and artificial intelligence will always produce better results,” Carter declares. “The way that Workspace behaves is that everything is AI-generated, but human-editable, which is different from an autonomous agent that takes the approach of, ‘here’s an issue, go spin your wheels for a while, and hopefully figure it out.'”
Though the Copilot AI helps code, the goal of Copilot Workspace is to provide developers an opportunity to learn while on the job. “Every part of the Workspace is editable, regenerable, [and] undoable. You can try multiple different approaches in different browser tabs. What if we did it like this? How might that look? We believe that represents a feedback loop developers can have with Copilot that gets them from a rough idea to a point where you start to see the shape, and then the exact code of what you’re looking for that emerges.”
Integrated terminal and secure port forwarding
To minimize context-switching and to verify the success of coding, developers can access a terminal within GitHub Copilot Workspace. As Carter describes it, “You can pull up a terminal right there on the browser, run Lint, build and test the code immediately to see if things function, and then run the app if it’s a web app or API, and then bring it up in your browser and, in a very vertically integrated way, see exactly how the code works. And then you can create a pull request.”
In other words, Copilot Workspace seeks to be that one-stop-shop developer environment, streamlining the coding process and providing programmers with some clarity.
Collaboration by nature
GitHub Copilot Workspace is not a one-player experience. The developer environment supports a collaboration feature where programmers can jointly create software.
“What we’ve seen is that the workspace can serve as this conversational asset that increases clarity of decisions by putting forward a proposal for how we would do what you’re talking about,” Carter states.
“If you have a stand-up and somebody mentioned some feedback they heard from a customer the day before, if you can, within a matter of minutes, write up that idea as an issue or a task and have [Copilot] Workspace help sketch out effectively the size, the complexity and the shape of how we would do that, you now have this means of reducing perceived complexity or F.U.D. on a team. That can be quite powerful”
The idea is to give developers more agency over the software roadmap, motivating them to develop features they think users want.
A new way to code from anywhere
Finally, the GitHub Copilot Workspace is not limited to the web. It can be accessed on mobile devices, including smartphones. The company believes that coding can be done everywhere, so if an idea strikes a developer, they can kick off a new project immediately.
This isn’t GitHub’s first or only mobile app. It has two: GitHub Codespaces and a namesake app. Carter describes the former, of which he was the original product manager on, as an app built around Visual Studio code, JetBrains and other coding languages. But, “those platforms can only go so far in terms of supporting mobility, so Codespaces effectively became great for iPads, but never for a phone or smaller devices,” he reveals.
The GitHub app, on the other hand, “does support editing scenarios, but effectively in small-scale form. So you have a PR out, somebody leaves a comment, and you want to make a single-line tweak to a file. So it’s meant to support you doing editing on the go, but not end-to-end development.”
Carter describes Copilot Workspace as GitHub’s “first fully-featured, actual mobile developer environment.” The web and mobile experiences are 100 percent parity. However, a native mobile client does not exist today, but developers can access Copilot Workspace on their mobile browser.
And though it has more capabilities than Codespaces and the GitHub mobile app, the company doesn’t think Copilot Workspace will replace them largely because of the use cases. “If we look at the GitHub mobile app [and] what it empowers, I would say that it enables a bunch of other use cases that would continue to be valuable that Workspace would not be trying to help solve. So, viewing notifications and incoming comments on a pull request, people assigning an issue to you, and navigating discussion threads if you’re an open-source maintainer. So the GitHub mobile app, as it’s currently used today, would continue to be a core part of those workflows for developers,” Carter remarks.
“In some ways, Copilot Workspace is complementing the already great GitHub mobile experience with something that can help take issues and ideas into a developer environment that you could turn into code, which currently today isn’t a scenario that the mobile app tries to solve.”
When will Workspace be generally available?
As mentioned earlier, GitHub Copilot Workspace is available in technical preview, another term for alpha. No timeline exists for when the developer environment will be generally available. Carter emphasizes that because Workspace originated from GitHub Next, the company is looking for feedback to understand better what a Go-to-Market strategy might look like. “We absolutely are very excited and confident in Workspace,” he declares. “But the timing of when a general availability release would happen wouldn’t be a decision I would make. That would be a partnership with the product team.”
Access to this offering is on a first-come, first-served basis, though GitHub may open it up to startups and small- to medium-sized businesses to receive rapid feedback.