CHAPTER 4Chatting with GitHub Copilot

While code completions allow for tightly integrated responses to keep you in the flow of coding, Copilot Chat enables you to have robust conversations about your code in an intuitive way. Copilot Chat can help you understand code, learn new topics of interest, refine code files, write tests, create documentation, and learn the features of Copilot.

Let's dive in to the things that you need to know to get working with Copilot Chat!

  • Discovering Copilot Chat
  • Defining Prompt Engineering with Copilot Chat
  • Commanding Your Conversation with Precision

Discovering Copilot Chat

This section introduces Copilot Chat, an AI-powered companion designed to streamline your coding process. We will outline how to effectively utilize chat features to enhance code understanding, problem-solving, and productivity within your development environment.

Chatting in the Sidebar

The sidebar chat window is a great place to converse with your pair programmer, GitHub Copilot. Whether you have a question about the code you are working on in the current file, a question about the workspace, or a question about the integrated development environment (IDE), Copilot Chat in the sidebar is a great place to start (see Figure 4.1).

A screenshot of the copilot-chat page. The options for chat: GitHub Copilot are listed on the left, and remove_duplicates.py is listed on the right.

Figure 4.1: Copilot Chat sidebar

In this example, you will see that you can ask Copilot questions about the current editor tab that is visible ...

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