Eighty-five percent of developers felt more confident in their code quality when authoring code with GitHub Copilot and GitHub Copilot Chat, according to a study by GitHub on 36 participants with between five and 10 years of software development experience.
Key findings:
The results of the study also revealed that the quality of the code authored and reviewed was better with GitHub Copilot Chat, even though developers are using it for the first time. Code reviews were more actionable and completed 15% faster with GitHub Copilot Chat.
The majority (88%) of developers reported maintaining a flow state with GitHub Copilot Chat, increasing their focus and enjoyment as well as making them feel less frustrated. Maintaining a flow state means less time spent searching and more time staying in the zone to code.
“We want to help developers spend their time on what matters most: building what’s next. This work started with GitHub Copilot offering code suggestions right in the IDE—but now with GitHub Copilot Chat, developers can not only get code suggestions, but also ask questions, get explanations, offer prompts for code, and more. That means they’re spending more time in the IDE—and in the flow,” Mario Rodriguez, vice president of Product at Github, noted in a blog post.
GithubCopilot Chat
GitHub Copilot Chat is a chat interface that answers coding-related questions directly within a supported IDE. Copilot Chat helps with various coding-related tasks, like generating unit cases, explaining code, proposing code fixes, and answering coding questions.
Despite its uses, the chat interface has a limited scope and may find difficulty handling complex code structures, may be biased towards certain coding styles and coding languages, has security risks, and may contain code snippets that match those in the training set. It may also present inaccurate code and incorrect responses to topics beyond coding.
GitHub recommends using GitHubCopilot Chat as a tool and not as a replacement for human programming. Developers are urged to secure coding privacy and safety, to keep questions exclusively related to coding only, to share feedback for the improvement of the tool, and to stay updated on future changes on GithubCopilot Chat.
