GitHub Announces Copilot Workspace

GitHub today announced a technical preview of Copilot Workspace, a task-centric, Copilot-native developer environment based on natural language. If that sounds whacky, well. You’re not alone.

“We are reimagining the nature of the developer experience itself with the technical preview of GitHub Copilot Workspace: the Copilot-native developer environment,” GitHub’s Thomas Dohmke writes in the announcement post. “Within Copilot Workspace, developers can now brainstorm, plan, build, test, and run code in natural language. This new task-centric experience leverages different Copilot-powered agents from start to finish, while giving developers full control over every step of the process.”

I guess I was expecting to see something based on Visual Studio Code, but Copilot Workspace is, as GitHub claims, a radical departure from existing software development tools. Instead of an integrated developer environment (IDE) or coding editor, Copilot Workspace aims to “materially lower the barrier of entry for who can build software,” and it does so using repositories and issues on the GitHub website and its Copilot agents as a starting point.

Basically, you use a Copilot Chat-based prompt on GitHub to take an existing GitHub issue and create a specification, and then a more specific plan, for solving it. Copilot Workspace uses GitHub Copilot to understand the source code in the repository, and it makes suggestions to help you get started fixing the problem, testing potential fixes, and iterating on the solution before committing it.

And I can’t claim to fully understand it.

GitHub Copilot Workspace is designed to be used from anywhere on any device—”because ideas can happen anywhere,” Dohmke notes—so it will work from smartphones as well as PCs. Basically, anything with a web browser. Developers interested in learning more or trying it out can sign up for the GitHub Copilot Workspace technical preview on the Copilot Workspace website.