Overview

GitHub Copilot Chat is the AI-powered chat interface for GitHub Copilot. It allows you to interact with AI models to get coding assistance, explanations, and suggestions in a conversational format.

Copilot Chat can help you with a variety of coding-related tasks, like offering you code suggestions, providing natural language descriptions of a piece of code's functionality and purpose, generating unit tests for your code, and proposing fixes for bugs in your code.

GitHub Copilot Chat is available in various environments:

• GitHub (the website).
• A range of IDEs such as Visual Studio Code, Xcode, and JetBrains IDEs.
• GitHub Mobile.

Different environments may have different features and capabilities, but the core functionality remains consistent across platforms. To explore the functionality available in each environment, see the Copilot Chat how-to guides and the Tutorials for GitHub Copilot.

Limitations

Copilot Chat is designed to assist with coding tasks, but you remain responsible for reviewing and validating the code it generates. It may not always produce correct or optimal solutions, and it can sometimes generate code that contains security vulnerabilities or other issues. Always test and review the code before using it in production.

Customizing Copilot Chat responses

GitHub Copilot in GitHub, Visual Studio Code, and Visual Studio can provide chat responses that are tailored to the way your team works, the tools you use, the specifics of your project, or your personal preferences, if you provide it with enough context to do so. Instead of repeating instructions in each prompt, you can create and save instructions for Copilot Chat to customize what responses you receive.

There are two types of custom instructions you can add for Copilot Chat:

• Repository instructions: You can create a custom instructions file for a repository, so that all prompts asked in the context of the repository automatically include the instructions you've defined
• Personal instructions: You can add personal instructions so that all the chat responses you, as a user, receive are tailored to your preferences

For more information, see Adding repository custom instructions for GitHub Copilot and Adding personal custom instructions for GitHub Copilot.

AI models for Copilot Chat

You can change the large language model that Copilot uses to generate responses to chat prompts, including premium models with advanced capabilities. You may find that different models perform better, or provide more useful responses, depending on the type of questions you ask. For more information see Changing the AI model for Copilot Chat.

Extending Copilot Chat in GitHub

GitHub Copilot Extensions integrate the power of external tools into Copilot Chat, helping you reduce context switching and receive responses with domain-specific context. You can install Copilot Extensions from the GitHub Marketplace or build private ones within your organization, then type @ in a chat window to see a list of your available extensions. To use an extension, select the extension from the list or type the full slug name, then type your prompt.

To learn more, see Using extensions to integrate external tools with Copilot Chat.