Micrsoft's GitHub users can now make use of Copilot Enterprise

While Microsoft has spun its partnership with OpenAI into the generalized Copilot experience for practically every one of its services under the sun, it was GitHub where the company first experimented with the pre-generative technology and yesterday that initial offering got expanded.

According to the GitHub news blog, open-source developers will now be able to make use of a new business product called GitHub Copilot Enterprise. Copilot Enterprise promises a new level of conversational and customizable AI experiences for developers.

Behind Copilot Enterprise are three core experience tenants that include:

1. Gain a deeper understanding of your organization’s unique codebase. Copilot Enterprise streamlines code navigation and comprehension for developers, enabling faster feature implementation, issue resolution, and code modernization. It empowers junior developers to contribute quicker, assists senior developers in handling live incidents, and aids in modernizing aging codebases by offering clear code summaries, relevant suggestions, and quick answers to queries about code behavior.
2. Quickly access organizational knowledge and best practices. Copilot Enterprise integrates chat directly into GitHub.com, enabling developers to ask questions and receive answers in natural language on your codebase, and will guide them to relevant documentation or existing solutions. This can facilitate rapid iteration at scale while improving code with personalized assistance and suggestions tailored to an organization’s specific codebase and standards.
3. Review pull requests faster. With generated pull request summaries, developers can spend less time drafting and more time merging. And with Copilot Enterprise’s capability to analyze pull request diffs, reviewers can quickly get up to speed with proposed changes and save time understanding the changes while spending more time providing valuable feedback.

Over the past few months, select developers have been testing Copilot Enterprise in preview form, but as of yesterday Microsoft has made the platform generally available for $39 USD per user per month. For comparison, GitHub’s original Copilot experience started out at $10 per user per month or $100 for year with a 60-day free trail attached.

The standard feature set was impressive just a little over a year ago that included code completion, function writing, unit test creation, adding comments to programming code, suggested developer languages, query generation assistance, and a general understanding of code context for relevant suggestions.

For $19 more dollars, developers can now take advantage of conversations tailored to their organizations in chat form, pull request diff analysis, fine-tuned models for code completion, and stash commands among many others.

GitHub also says that Copilot Enterprise does not “use any of your organization’s private repositories or prompts and suggestions to train the machine learning models that power our products, unless you expressly instruct us to do so, for example with custom models.”

To access GitHub Copilot Enterprise, current Copilot Business users can utilize the same seat and policy management features to upgrade as an admin and as a single developer a new GitHub Copilot IDE-extension can be installed or a CLI extension made available for use in the terminal.