👋 Raise your hand if you’ve ever used GitHub Copilot to help you build:

• Video games 🎮
• Applications 📱
• Websites 🖥️
• Automation scripts 📜
• Data science projects 🤓
• Operating systems 🚀
• Other things 💡

Pretty neat experience, huh? Copilot changes the software-building game, granting you the ability to create code with newfound speed and quality.

But did you know that Copilot isn’t just for personal projects? It’s for the workplace, too, helping teams code quickly and take their productivity and innovation to the next level. In fact, we recently came out with a few nifty features, like chat participants, Copilot Extensions, and Copilot Workspace that can help you bring Copilot to the workplace and supercharge your team’s process.

In this edition of The GitHub Insider, we’re going to provide an inside look at how you can build quickly and effectively at the office with these new features.

Let’s go! 👇

Chat participants 🕵️

If you’re using VS Code or Visual Studio, there are a number of different chat participants you can talk to directly in your IDE.

Using participants to ask questions yields better results than asking Copilot general questions, because the participants are focused on a specific domain. Therefore, you’re more likely to get useful answers.

If you go to Copilot Chat and you use the @ sign, you can see the three participants: @terminal, @vscode, and @workspace.

With the @terminal participant, you can ask how to do something in the terminal. For example, you can type:

“How can I move a file from one directory to another?”

When you click enter, it’ll show you exactly how, with the context and focus being specific to just the terminal.

Even better, if you click on the “Insert into Terminal” icon (it looks like a little command line), it’ll shoot you over to the terminal where you could modify and execute the command.

Another participant is @vscode. This participant has access to all the settings and commands in Visual Studio Code. Because of this, you can ask vague questions like:

“Tell me the name of that thing where Visual Studio Code fake opens a file? And how can I disable it?”

Yes, you can be this general because of the very specific context.

And finally: @workspace. This participant knows about all the context of your personal workspace and can answer questions about it.

Internally, this participant is powered by GitHub’s knowledge graph, semantic search, local code indexes, and VS Code language services.

Imagine, in a project, you want to know what version of node (or insert your framework/language of choice) it uses. Not a problem, you ask the participant in the chat:

“What version of node does this use?”

And voila! It’ll tell you where it’s being used. Plus, it provides references so you can actually visit the files.

Participants like @workspace can also be combined with slash commands, which are shortcuts to specific functionalities that determine the intent of what you want to do.

So for instance, you can use the /explain slash command, prefaced with the @workspace participant, to have Copilot explain something about the code in your project. Just highlight the block of code you want explained and submit it in the chat, and it’ll explain it for you!

Of course, you can use all the slash commands with the @workspace agent, like /fix, (that can help you fix broken code), /newNotebook, (which can suggest an outline for a new notebook), and /help (which can save you time from searching Docs).

And remember, after you’ve submitted many different commands, you can wipe your history with the /clear command, which can give you a fresh start for tackling a new project.

Take a look at this video for more!

GitHub Copilot Extensions (in beta 🚧) 🔗

The built-in participants as part of GitHub Copilot Chat are great, but what if you could bring the power of Copilot to some of your favorite tools and services at work? This is where GitHub Copilot Extensions enter the picture!

Copilot Extensions enable you to build and deploy to the cloud in your natural language with your preferred tools and services, all without leaving the IDE or GitHub.com. They integrate with various platforms like DataStax, Docker, Azure, and Sentry, facilitating seamless context switching, improving productivity, and streamlining development. Your organization can also create private extensions for internal tools, which leverage Copilot for your specific needs.

Copilot Extensions are currently in beta and available in the GitHub Marketplace. Right now, you can access Copilot Extensions from companies such as DataStax, Docker, Lambda Test, LaunchDarkly, McKinsey & Company, Octopus Deploy, Pangea, Pinecone, Product Science, ReadMe, Sentry, and Teams Toolkit.

And developers can also build Copilot Chat functionality into their VS Code extensions as well. In the coming weeks and months, users will be able to access extensions from Stripe, MongoDB, and Microsoft (including Teams Toolkit and Microsoft 365) on Visual Studio Marketplace for VSCode as well.

If you want to build your own Copilot Extension, join the Copilot Partner Program or check out the documentation for the Chat Participants API for VS Code.

Copilot Workspace (technical preview) 🚀

Doing all of this inside your IDE is great, but what if you could use Copilot across your entire GitHub experience?

With the Copilot Workspace experience, you can leverage AI-powered agents from start to finish, while remaining in full control over every step of the process. It represents a radically new way of building software with natural language to enable heightened creativity as well as faster and easier coding.

Everything in Copilot Workspace starts with what we call a “task,” or a natural language description of intent. The task always has a context, which starts at ground zero: a GitHub repository.

In the technical preview, Copilot Workspace supports four types of tasks: solving issues, refining pull requests, creating repositories from templates and ad-hoc tasks.

We hope these features help supercharge your workday. Let us know if you try them out!

Bring Copilot to work now

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✨ This newsletter was written by Christina Warren and produced by Gwen Davis. ✨

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