“Can editing code feel more tactile, like painting with Photoshop brushes?”
Researchers at GitHub Next asked that question this week — and then supplied the answer. “We added a toolbox of brushes to our Copilot Labs Visual Studio Code extension that can modify your code…. Just select a few lines, choose your brush, and see your code update.”
The tool’s web page includes interactive before-and-after examples demonstrating:
Add Types brushFix Bugs brushAdd Debugging Statements brushMake More Readable brush
And last month Microsoft’s principle program manager for browser tools shared an animated GIF showing all the brushes in action.
“In the future, we’re interested in adding more useful brushes, as well as letting developers store their own custom brushes,” adds this week’s announcement. “As we explore enhancing developers’ workflows with Machine Learning, we’re focused on how to empower developers, instead of automating them. This was one of many explorations we have in the works along those lines.”
It’s ultimately grafting an incredibly easy interface onto “ML-powered code modification”, writes Visual Studio Magazine, noting that “The bug-fixing brush, for example can fix a simple typo, changing a variable name from the incorrect ‘low’ to the correct ‘lo’….
“All of the above brushes and a few others have been added to the Copilot Labs brushes toolbox, which is available for anyone with a GitHub Copilot license, costing $10 per month or $100 per year…. At the time of this writing, the extension has been installed 131,369 times, earning a perfect 5.0 rating from six reviewers.”
