Announcing GitHub Copilot Labs

[irealva]

⚠️ UPDATE March 30 ⚠️: The new GitHub Copilot Labs extension is HERE. And our new discussion forum is HERE.

⚠️ UPDATE March 28 ⚠️: We are deprecating Labs from the Copilot Nightly extension starting tomorrow! But don't worry, these features are not going away. Labs will be available as a separate extension we'll release very soon. Thanks to everyone who has been an early user!

Greetings!

You may have noticed some cool new functionality in recent nightlies of GitHub Copilot for Visual Studio Code! We’ve added the Labs sidebar, a home for experiments we’re building with the same technologies that power GitHub Copilot.

The first application is Explain. Select some code, and ask GitHub Copilot to explain that code to you in plain language:

Create custom prompts

We provide a few preset prompts to get you started: three that explain what a particular block of code does, and another that generates example code for calling a function.

You can customize the prompt and stop sequence of a query in order to come up with new applications that use Codex to interpret code. Creating these can feel like more of an art than a science! Small changes in the formulation of the prompt and stop sequence can produce very different results. The three different “explain” examples showcase strategies that tend to produce useful responses from the model, but this is uncharted territory! We’re excited to see what you use this for.

These articles on prompt design and stop sequences are a great place to start if you want to craft your own presets.

Please share feedback on GitHub Copilot Labs! Have you found a prompt and stop sequence combination that works well, or did you generate something particularly helpful? Let us know so we improve the sidebar, and implement more useful presets and features over time.

— GitHub Next

[minimaxir]

I mean, it's not wrong.

Ok, ok, that's cheating. But for fun I put some of my galaxy-brain AI generated code examples pre-Cortex to see what happens.

tbh, better than expected.

[idan]

Wow, never thought to use this to explain regexes in plain english, mindblown.gif

[jonathankoren]

The explanation is wrong though. It's four alphanums, a dollar sign, and then three more alphanums.

[mathmul]

Not wrong, incomplete.

[Selena20191]

The explanation is wrong though. It's four alphanums, a dollar sign, and then three more alphanums.

[TimDaub]

[ganeshkrishnan1]

This is not the place to discuss it.

[TimDaub]

makes sense

[Selena20191]

makes sense
W

[Milo123459]

When is the stable version containing explain coming out?

[idan]

Hi @Milo123459! We are keeping this in Nightlies for now to test, and I imagine that we'll promote it into mainline builds early in the new year. No commitments yet in terms of timeline.

[quackduck]

Amazing!

Do you think the JetBrains release of new features will lag behind the VS Code release? (that makes sense to me)

Maybe around a month or so?

[idan]

Labs is VS Code-only for now!

[quackduck]

what do you think the lag may be?

[Selena20191]

👍

[bdougie]

Tested this out earlier today and it was impressive.

A suggestion for a future enhancement: Adding function headers output, i.e. like in JavaScript would be amazing. I work on a function and then "Ask Copilot" for the headers.

[irealva]

Thanks for the suggestion!

[datapolitical]

This looks awesome! What is the typical wait like at present to join the beta?

[MattStopa]

3 eternities.

[datapolitical]

Well that sounds promising

[aidantorrence]

it's 24 hours

[Selena20191]

👍

[AashJ]

Are there plans for an API?

[irealva]

Not for now, sorry.

[TarunavBA]

Will people who are in problems as in #7716 Or related will be able to use this even without copilot?

[adarshaacharya]

@TarunavBA i think you should delete github copilot and install github copilot nightly.

[CaelumF]

This seems to go further in providing unrestricted access to the underlying Codex API. Has there been any thoughts about the potential for abuse, for example non-code prompts like the generation of propaganda and fabricated news? On OpenAI's use case guidelines it disallows serving open-ended inputs, and my understanding was that this is for all of the APIs including Codex? Are there any filters for this feature?

[MulleDK19]

Tried a few things. Not really helpful so far since it's hardcoded to cut off after one line!?
No matter what, it generates only one line, then stops, so I'm only getting very incomplete outputs.

[irealva]

Was going to write the same, some combinations of prompts and stop sequences generate no response. Or post an example so we can take a look.

[MulleDK19]

Stops make no difference, with or without, I get one line back, always. No matter what stop I put, it just generates one line ending in whatever stop I've specified.

[MulleDK19]

[irealva]

Will try to replicate

[irealva]

I believe your first example is a csharp file. Not sure why but in this case if you create the prompt without 1. it gives you a better answer. Again this is where there's a ton of variation in prompt building between languages and code samples. We're learning along with you!

I tried:

• /* The code above does the following: space at the end is important!
• /* Here is the explanation for the code above: space at the end is important!

[ldorigo]

Neat! Love that you allow making prompts - hopefully soon it will be possible to design and save prompts and call them with special commands and keybindings. Specialized prompts for generating docstrings, normalizing code conventions, adding type annotations, ... so many possibilities.

Regarding code explanation, you can take a look at a post I made on Codex line-by-line explanation that works fantastically: https://community.openai.com/t/best-line-by-line-code-explanation-prompt-i-found-so-far/12272/6

EDIT: Just tried it, and it looks like it doesn't work for all languages? I tried it on a shell script and it does not react to when I highlight code.

[irealva]

We'll take a look! Should work for all languages...

[irealva]

Hi @ldorigo thanks for reporting this and for your patience. We fixed the language problem and it should work on the next nightly release for shell scripts.

[Milo123459]

Not sure if this was already said, but maybe ignoring a bulk of indentation would be nice?

For example, see image above - maybe it could remove those tabs, but keep them when they open up into a callback or something.

[aidantorrence]

Took me like 15 minutes to figure out how to open the Labs sidebar. Would be nice if there was better explanation.

[masayahingpuno]

Took me like 15 minutes to figure out how to open the Labs sidebar. Would be nice if there was better explanation.

Hahaha me too!

[aidantorrence]

Here's an explanation for anyone confused:

1. Install Github Copilot Nightly and uninstall Github Copilot
2. There is a Github Copilot icon on the side, click it and that opens up the labs sidebar.

Screen.Recording.2021-12-02.at.4.12.29.PM.mov

[masayahingpuno]

You can also type Ctrl + Shift + P then search for Copilot Labs then create your own keyboard shortcut

[irealva]

Thanks for sharing the video @aidantorrence!

[aidantorrence]

Seems to only go to a certain length of explanation. So if it's a larger snippet, it will often end prematurely before explaining everything.

[aidantorrence]

I like:

/* above code in plain english:

1.

[irealva]

We'll try to figure out how to not cut these off prematurely.

[irealva]

Hi @aidantorrence this should be fixed in the next nightly build. The explanations shouldn't cut off prematurely anymore.

[ShauryaAg]

regex to explain: /(?<=@)(\w+)/g

Result:

The explanation of the above regex says it matches the word against "hello" (which it does not)
The above regex only looks for words after @ symbol, for example: @ShauryaAg

PS: Tried to replicate, but couldn't.

[irealva]

The model is certainly not perfect! You'd be helping improve it — or at least helping us understand where it performs poorly — by submitting feedback with the buttons that show up after the code explanation.

[MeltingObsidian]

It was just giving an example by testing it against the string "hello" and explaining the outcome.

[SiddharthShyniben]

This is cool! Waiting for vim support ;-;

[laoshaw]

yes please, need vim support

[irealva]

⚠️ UPDATE March 28 ⚠️: We are deprecating Labs from the Copilot Nightly extension starting tomorrow! But don't worry, these features are not going away. Labs will be available as a separate extension we'll release very soon. Thanks to everyone who has been an early user!

[MeltingObsidian]

We will eagerly wait for the new Labs extension. By the way, the Nightly extension will still be active, i.e., till the release of the new extension, its functionality will not be disabled, right? Or do we have to switch to the original Github Copilot extension?

[irealva]

Good question! So the Nightly extension will otherwise remain exactly the same. The only thing we're pulling out to a separate extension is the sidebar part (aka. the part we're calling Labs with all these early/experimental features).

[MeltingObsidian]

So, the sidebar will be removed with the next update to the Copilot Nightly extension. That's it?

[irealva]

Correct, you got it.

[irealva]

⚠️ UPDATE March 30 ⚠️: The new GitHub Copilot Labs extension is HERE. And our new discussion forum is HERE.

[liby]

@irealva
It's the same code, but the explanation doesn't seem as detailed and useful as it used to be.

[conioh]

I let Copilot write some code.
Copilot labs has a hard time understanding what Copilot prime wrote:

🤷

[veb]

Hey mate, I would suggest creating a new thread over on https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions and simply linking this one. 🙃

[xShazzy]

Will it be available in JetBrains tools?

[idan]

Hey! Sorry, we have no plans to implement labs for any editor outside of VS Code at this time.

[cantonalex]

Any updates on this?

[kvenn]

Yeah my team would benefit greatly from this on IntelliJ! Love the work ya'll are doing <3

[MCKevmeister]

Hey! Sorry, we have no plans to implement labs for any editor outside of VS Code at this time.

Why not? It seems like a large portion of the user base uses copilot outside of vs code. Is it just that there would be no/less access to the telemetry of vs code? Is it that Microsoft just prefer everyone use vs code and wants to force users back into their ecosystem?

Not opening the tool up seems like a very unusual choice.

[dobsonddev]

The upstream, end-answer very much seems to be this:

Microsoft just prefer everyone use vs code and wants to force users back into their ecosystem

mr crabs money money money money

Given the absurd market share that M has over dev solutions, it would only be true to capitalism for them to pigeonhole their users into their solutions through reducing solution accessibility to only their platforms.

Or maybe there is a more sensible, less tin foil hat reason for this and I am being short sighted. Either way Copilot Labs would be incredible to have in JetBrains IDEs.

[mchaniotakis]

When should we expect test generation for python?

[oluwatobiiloba]

I can't seem to run the tests generated. It returns "missing module" error

[mattbrandman]

I had the same issue, we’re you able to resolve this?

[lucasmd]

Still no update about this on IntelliJ / Jetbrains ?

[lenguyenthanh]

please support other editors 🙏

[ruslaniv]

Could anybody please explain what prompt and stop are. I do not understand their purpose at all. What is the use case for these features?

[RobertoPelonara]

It has to do with "prompt design", the how you ask the AI to do the work basically.
Some useful links here:
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6654000-best-practices-for-prompt-engineering-with-openai-api
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5072263-how-do-i-use-stop-sequences

[DominickVale]

Why are you choosing to leave out a good portion of developers that use jetbrains IDEs? Is the reason technical or...

[MCKevmeister]

Technically no access to that juicy juicy telemetry would be my guess

[MCKevmeister]

Please allow access to the tools offered by Github copilot labs outside of vs code, For example via api, terminal, other editors. Otherwise rename it for clarity to VS code labs

[kodeo]

Does GitHub Copilot Labs honor the same privacy setting "Allow GitHub to use my code snippets for product improvements" as the main product?

[MannyKayy]

I would like to try this with github copilot labs within visual studio enterprise.. is there a timeline for this?