Learning GitHub Copilot

Chapter 3. Chatting with Copilot in the IDE

In popular AI platforms like ChatGPT, the chat interface is your gateway to interacting with LLMs. Like talking to another person, having a running dialog with the AI feels more natural. It also allows for extended conversations to explore topics more thoroughly.

The chat interfaces included with Copilot offer those same advantages but targeted for the coding domain. The previous inline functionality discussed in Chapter 2 provides direct, quick, targeted code suggestions from Copilot. These code completions are based on what you’re working on. But having interactive, free-form discussions about coding can be invaluable, just as discussing coding challenges or ideas with a coworker is useful. In fact, it quickly becomes hard to imagine using Copilot without using its chat features.

In this chapter, we’ll explore how to use and interact with Copilot’s chat functionality (Copilot Chat). We’ll cover basic and advanced aspects of Chat.

We’ll start by helping you understand how to access Chat’s primary interface, how to parse its output, and how to manage multiple Chat sessions.

Following that, we’ll briefly look at how best to do prompting for the Chat interfaces and then explore the various Chat interfaces themselves. To make sure you can target the prompts in the interfaces appropriately, we’ll survey various shortcuts and modifiers built into Copilot, including participants and variables. We’ll also explore how to use Chat in the IDE’s ...