GitHub announced Tuesday that Copilot Chat, an AI chat interface for asking coding-related questions and generating code, is now generally available on its mobile app. The Microsoft-owned developer platform first announced this feature last November.
At first glance, a mobile app might not be the most obvious place to use GitHub's Copilot Chat. After all, that's not where developers work. However, GitHub believes there are quite a few use cases for Copilot Chat on mobile, making it a worthwhile endeavor.
Mario Rodriguez, GitHub's recently promoted senior vice president of products, told me that mobile apps are already available to perform tasks such as starring repositories and some of the social features GitHub offers. Very popular. Many developers also use the app, released in late 2019, to quickly review small pull requests on the go. Some developers are already using Copilot Chat, which was released in beta on mobile a few months ago, to ask additional questions about these pull requests.
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General coding questions are also a common use case. “There are quite a few times when someone asks you a question, perhaps when you're out with friends. You say, “Actually, I don't remember those details, so I quickly looked them up and asked my co-pilot.'' Let's see.'' […]” explained Rodriguez.
Some developers use mobile chat functionality to ask questions about specific repositories while on the go.
“Mobile is typically optimized for completing tasks,” Rodriguez said when asked how the team thinks about designing for mobile. “If you think about the way our mobile interface works, sometimes you have a very short amount of time to complete something on the go, so the mobile interface is optimized for completing tasks. You might just be drinking coffee, but you might only have five minutes before the kids wake up and go down the stairs, so you want to get something done very quickly.”
Image credit: GitHub
To enable this, the Copilot icon is now front and center in the mobile app. “When you open the mobile app, you'll see his little Copilot icon there. You'll instantly start a conversation with Copilot and get the answers you need,” Rodriguez says. “I think the first innovations we bring to mobile devices will primarily be about how we can get to the answer quickly.”
But he also said that the company's vision for the future is fairly broad and similar to what GitHub is doing with its recently announced Workspace. The company describes it as a “Copilot native development environment” that allows developers to plan using natural language. , build and test your code in natural language.
“How we want Copilot to evolve is not just to help you complete tasks, but to take it to the next level and help you write programs in natural language very quickly. I think it's about being able to do it,” Rodriguez said. This could allow many people who aren't trained as developers to build tools to get their work done faster, he said.