At its Universe conference, GitHub today announced a number of major new products, including the Spark project for writing applications entirely with AI, as well as multi-model support for its Copilot service. But Copilot itself is also getting quite a few updates.
With this release, Microsoft-owned GitHub is bringing Copilot to Apple’s Xcode environment for the first time. Now in public preview, this will allow developers who build apps in Apple’s IDE with the assistance of Copilot. For now, the focus here is on code completion, but Copilot Chat and its other features will likely make their way into Xcode over time.
Copilot already supports Apple’s preferred languages Swift and Objective-C, so there’s no surprise there. Copilot, like on other platforms, will offer multi-line suggestions when it can and users will be able to block suggestions that match public code.
“This is a major milestone in our ongoing mission to make Copilot an essential tool for developers across a wide variety of platforms,” GitHub wrote in today’s announcement. “Now, Apple developers can enjoy the same intelligent coding assistance, seamlessly integrated into their favorite IDE.”
All paying Copilot users on individual, business, and enterprise plans will have access to this public beta now. All they have to do to get started is install the Copilot extension for Xcode.
It’s worth noting that while Copilot itself never natively supported Xcode, we’ve seen a few projects like the CopilotForXcode extension that took matters into their own hands and used GitHub’s APIs to bring Copilot code completion to Xcode.
Among the new capabilities are Copilot Chat in VS Code making edits to multiple files at the same time to solve more complex issues, a new code review feature that offers developers feedback on their code, and the ability to give Copilot Chat custom instructions about a user’s (or organization’s) preferred tools, organizational knowledge, and more.
Copilot Extensions, which integrate developer tools and services from companies like Atlassian, Docker, Sentry, and Stack Overflow into Copilot, remain in preview but will become generally available in early 2025. At that time, users will also be able to build their own private extensions that can work with their organization’s DIY tools.
