Reimagining the developer experience with GitHub Copilot​
AI has the potential to change every job on the planet. It can make employees more efficient, less stressed, and more fulfilled. For most jobs, this is a vision for the future, but for software developers, this isn’t a vision at all—it’s today’s reality.
GitHub Copilot, the most widely adopted AI developer tool in the world , is leading this charge. In our last blog post, we talked about the ongoing paradigm shift from developer productivity to developer experience—and how leading firms are no longer prioritizing how much code is created but instead focusing on everything that goes into creating that code. In this post, we cover how GitHub Copilot is revolutionizing the way developers work and how it’s drastically improving DevEx every day.
Improving DevEx with AI​
DevEx is all about making life easier for developers and removing their pain points. To illustrate the power of GitHub Copilot, let’s look at a few of the most common struggles for developers and see how GitHub Copilot can address them.
Security​
Security is one of the most common challenges for developers. The goal with security tools is to provide smooth guardrails for developers, but often these tools can feel like concrete roadblocks. If this sounds familiar, it’s probably time for better security tools.
GitHub Copilot helps here by scanning code in real time for potential vulnerabilities, flagging them so devs can fix them as they write. This not only saves developers time but also reduces business costs, since addressing a vulnerability early on is less time-consuming and expensive than remediating it later.
Onboarding to new projects​
Starting on a new job or project is never easy. You have to learn the landscape, find your footing, and get familiar with the new codebase. Historically, this has taken developers days, if not weeks, but AI is changing that. Now, GitHub Copilot can scan your codebase, understand it in an instant, and answer all your questions, like:
- “What does this function do?”
- “How is this schema set up?”
- “Where are these variables used?”
Now, you don’t have to onboard alone. As itemized in “Announcing new research: The case for investing in DevEx,” our research shows that when developers get answers to their questions quickly, their teams report 50% less tech debt, and when developers understand their codebase well, they feel 42% more productive. This means that GitHub Copilot is not only saving developers time as they onboard, but also it improves business outcomes in the long run.
Repetitive and low-complexity tasks​
The cool part about being a developer is building something new and awesome. The less cool part is all the admin work that comes along with it—adding comments, writing documentation, and writing repetitive infrastructure code that you’ve written 100 times before.
GitHub Copilot is finally eliminating these headaches. It can write documentation, clean up code, and handle repetitive tasks with ease, allowing developers to focus their time and effort on the things that matter, like building innovative solutions to push the world forward.
AI tools are improving DevEx, but this is just the start​
We’ve just covered how the world’s leading AI developer tool, GitHub Copilot, can improve the developer experience by removing common headaches, such as security, onboarding, and repetitive tasks, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. GitHub Copilot and our other cutting-edge developer tools are completely changing the way that developers build and deploy software—all with the singular goal of making life better for developers. To learn more about how modern tools are revolutionizing developer workflows, stay tuned for the rest of this blog series, and try GitHub Copilot today!