GitHub Copilot Chat for enterprise becomes generally available in December, and the GitHub site is integrating the artificial intelligence assistant across its entire platform, promising that AI will infuse every step of the developer lifecycle. “Just as GitHub was founded on Git, today we are re-founded on Copilot,” the Microsoft-owned company announced this month. Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, the new configuration will offer inline Copilot Chat for code questions, contextual guidance and “slash commands” for /fix and /test. The AI tool is designed to assist coders with their everyday workflows with a series of “one-click” assists and other shortcuts.

GitHub had been offering Copilot Chat in beta mode, but in a format that only addressed the current code with no scope for planning and preemption. Announced at the platform’s annual GitHub Universe conference this month, GitHub Copilot Chat for enterprise changes that.

“It will connect Copilot Chat to all the code repositories and knowledge bases that a business has, providing it additional context to work from,” reports SiliconANGLE.

“This brings it to the rest of the software development lifecycle,” GitHub VP of Product Ryan Salva told SiliconANGLE, noting that “developers can ask about who is contributing to the codebase and where symbols and classes and methods are being used so that they can make sense of their code outside of their code editor.”

By popular demand, GitHub is bringing Copilot Chat to the JetBrains suite of IDEs, available in preview, the company said in a blog post. Starting in December, all of this will be generally available as part of  existing GitHub Copilot subscriptions for organizations and individuals. The offering is also being made available at no cost to verified teachers, students, and maintainers of popular open source projects.

“Enterprise users will soon be able to fine-tune their models based on their specific organization’s way of doing things, such as their preferred software development kit versions, libraries or programming languages,” says SiliconANGLE, explaining that “many different businesses could benefit from this, such as those that have a preference for a specific version of Java and those that use their own internal application programming interfaces, libraries or SDKs.”

GitHub is even taking it a step further to enhance usefulness by enabling businesses to upload their documentation knowledge base into the AI tool so it can provide assistance beyond code and configuration.

Voicebot.ai describes the change as “sweeping,” noting that “the company suggested GitHub has been ‘re-founded’ on the back of Copilot as it evolved from an autocomplete coding assistant to a full development platform transforming how software gets built.”