GitHub announced yesterday that it’s bringing the AI-powered Copilot coding assistant to business customers. The pair programming tool has been available for individuals since June, and the new offering will help larger teams of developers to improve their speed and productivity.
With this release, enterprise customers will be able to purchase and manage GitHub Copilot licenses for their employees. GitHub Copilot for business provides admin controls to let IT Pros configure settings on behalf of the organization.
“We’ve measured the impact GitHub Copilot has on developer happiness since it launched for individuals. Because of how GitHub Copilot understands natural language and code, it gives you WAY more than just a productivity boost. It helps you focus on business logic-over-boilerplate, and discover ideas you might not have otherwise considered. All from the comfort of your editor,” GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke explained.
GitHub Copilot has also introduced a new “Hey GitHub” feature to enable voice-based interactions for developers with disabilities. It allows developers to input voice commands to generate the desired code. The feature is available in beta and only works with Visual Studio Code. Developers can sign up on this page to join the Hey, GitHub! Waitlist.
Additionally, GitHub announced that Codespaces are now generally available for individuals. It’s a cloud-powered development environment that provides access to popular languages, tools, and utilities. GitHub is offering access to 60 hours of Codespaces to all users for free every month.
GitHub has teamed up with JetBrains to enable developers to use their preferred IDE in Codespaces. JupyterLab is also available for ML engineers and data scientists in public preview.
GitHub adds a new private vulnerability reporting tool
GitHub has also launched a new feature that makes it easier for enterprise customers to report, analyze and mitigate vulnerabilities in open-source repositories. The private vulnerability reporting tool is available in public preview, and it’s expected to become generally available in early 2023.
Last but not least, the GitHub Actions Importer allows enterprise customers to quickly plan migrations from a legacy automation tool to GitHub Actions. GitHub Enterprise Server 3.7 brings several new features like reusable Actions workflow support, code scanning alerts, and an updated management console.