GitHub’s Universe conference is under way in San Francisco and online, and to nobody’s surprise the agenda is dominated by Copilot and AI, with numerous new features previewed including the ability to train the assistant on private organizational code and documentation.

In his keynote, CEO Thomas Dohmke said GitHub is being “re-founded on Copilot”. He also said there are now over 37,000 organizations who use the company’s AI coding assistant.

A key missing piece in the existing Copilot offering is its ignorance of the internal code within an organization. A new plan called Copilot Enterprise is expected to plug this gap, and is described by GitHub Software Engineer Colin Merkel as “Copilot customized to your organization.” Copilot Enterprise also requires a subscription to GitHub Enterprise Cloud ($21 per user/month), an Enterprise account hosted by GitHub, rather than GitHub Enterprise Server which is self-hosted.

This means Copilot now has three editions: Individual at $10 per user/month, Business at $19.00, and Enterprise at $39.00 plus the cost of Enterprise Cloud. Developers attending Universe cheered the new features but not the price. The new plan though includes not only Chat personalized to an organization’s codebase, but also documentation search and summaries and code review skills. Enterprise is in preview now, and scheduled to be generally available from February 2024.

There is plenty more. In summary:

• Copilot Chat is generally available from December 2023
• Copilot Chat will be added to the GitHub mobile app for Android and iOS
• Copilot Chat will be available in JetBrains IDEs such as IntelliJ IDEA
• The AI assistant will also be available on GitHub.com with the ability to explain code
• A feature called Code scanning autofix, now in preview, will suggest fixes for security issues
• AI Powered secret scanning will root out passwords stored in code
• An AI-powered Regular Expression assistant will help author regular expressions, well known as awkward to code

GitHub introduced a new partner program whereby Copilot can integrate with third-party developer tools. 25 partners have already signed up, including Datastax, LaunchDarkly, Postman, Hashicorp and Datadog.

Attendees were also given a preview of Copilot Workspace, with the ability both to plan and to implement ideas put into GitHub issues. Copilot Workspace is promised for release next year.

GitHub is not the first company to deliver a coding assistant that can train on internal code. AWS previewed a similar feature last month, for its CodeWhisperer AI assistant, priced at $19.00 per user/month. Codeium is another example, with a self-hosted option that has “optional fine-tuning on your code base” though pricing is not published. The Copilot advantage, perhaps, is its integration with the GitHub platform. More details on the official GitHub Blog.

Universe also saw the release of GitHub’s annual Octoverse survey, with data drawn from activity on the site. Since the last report, there was a 26 percent increase in the number of developer accounts, and 169 percent increase in usage of GitHub Actions, automated workflows for building and testing code. India is now the 2nd biggest developer community on GitHub after the United States, with China 3rd, and Brazil 4^th, pushing the UK into 5^th place. With regard to programming languages, TypeScript overtakes Java to be the 3^rd biggest language, with JavaScript remaining top and Python 2^nd.