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So you’ve finally been plucked off the GitHub Copilot chat waitlist. Now what?
The eagerly awaited coding assistant/chat integration — Copilot meets ChatGPT — in Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio 2022 opens up all kinds of opportunities for developers looking to increase their productivity and efficiency. By providing suggestions based on the context of the code and the question being asked, GitHub Copilot chat can help developers save time and reduce errors in their code.
Here are some tips on installation, setup and usage, summarizing various capabilities that can help developers work smarter and faster. These pertain to the VS Code offering only, not the Visual Studio IDE counterpart.
Getting the Bits
This is cutting-edge preview stuff, so GitHub Copilot Chat requires:
After the Insiders editor is launched, you can install the Nightly extension by opening the Extensions tab in the usual ways (clicking the icon in the activity panel or Cmd+Shift+X on Mac or Ctrl+Shift+X on Windows), searching for and then installing the tool. You may need to sign in to GitHub, and will need to authorize the Insiders build if that hasn’t been done.
After that, the chat interface is accessible via a new Chat icon in the activity panel, though a restart of the editor may be required to get it to appear.
Playing with the Bits
So what can you do with the new chat integration?
First, it’s always nice to get the day started with the right vibe by greeting your new assistant with a “Good morning!” to which it cheerfully replies “Good morning! How can I assist you with your programming needs today?” while also providing a suggestion on potential questions to continue the conversation.
For a historical background on how chat integration came to be and what it does, Microsoft’s introductory March 30 blog post is a good place to start.
While that post lists capabilities and benefits, it also includes this observation: “But perhaps the most important reason for integrating chat is because having a two-way conversation helps you decide what is right and what is wrong. Large language models are not perfect, and they don’t ‘think’. They simply figure out the next best word to respond with (granted, they are pretty good at this).
“As the Pilot, you are always in charge, and you decide which of Copilot’s suggestions to take and what code to bring into your workspace. The ability to ask clarifying questions or provide additional specifics helps you make those key decisions.”
As far as capabilities, upon starting up, the tool gives you a synopsis:
More specifically, the tool can help with:
Some of those things can be done via various slash commands that tailor the conversation to common tasks. Developers can pick from the available commands by typing /:
As far as that first item, asking questions about VS Code, those could include:
As far as the last item, /help, it brings up advice like:
“Start by asking questions as if you were talking to a real programmer. This means including implementation details, asking clarifying questions and providing feedback like logs or error messages.”
It also provides several tips to have a great conversation:
Note that one thing it can’t do is insert HTML list item tags, <li> and </li> around a list of sentences, something this article makes great use of. I tried repeatedly to get chat to do this, but while it happily agreed to do so and seemingly offered up the result, the result was just blank space — nothing.
I finally asked ChatGPT (Plus version, with GPT-4 AND WebPilot plugin) how to write the prompt, and even that prompt didn’t work. ChatGPT, however, superbly accomplished the task with its own suggested prompt. This indicates that the chat integration isn’t really “Copilot meets ChatGPT” as mentioned above because ChatGPT can do things GitHub Copilot chat can’t.
There are probably things Copilot chat can do that ChatGPT can’t do, though, as it’s optimized for coding (just not HTML list item tags), but the only way to find out is to get your hands on the tool and play around with it.
That, of course, depends upon being accepted from the waitlist. If you still aren’t on the waitlist, it can be accessed here.
While this article is VS Code-specific, much of it also pertains to GitHub Copilot chat integration into the Visual Studio IDE. For more on that, a good place to start is the March 22 blog post from Microsoft titled, “GitHub Copilot chat for Visual Studio 2022.”
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer for Converge360.
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