Microsoft is previewing GitHub Copilot for Azure in an ambitious expansion of its AI app development toolkit that some say could fundamentally change how developers build software for the AI era. The new premise is that switching from one software to another, as developers often do, should be seamless, not disruptive — sort of a real-time language translation and integration system for code. To fend off the move by Microsoft, AWS announced it is making its Q Developer AI code assistant available as an inline chat add-on accessible from IDEs like JetBrains and Microsoft’s own Visual Studio.

Microsoft’s announcement is “particularly significant” for its overlap with another happening, VentureBeat writes, citing the emergence of “a new category of software developer … the AI engineer,” as organizations “rush to integrate AI capabilities into their applications.”

Going forward, app development workloads are all going to involve integrating artificial intelligence, whether at the enterprise, commercial or consumer levels, GitHub Chief Product Officer Mario Rodriguez tells VentureBeat, which makes the case that this “signals a fundamental change in how software is conceived, built, and deployed.”

Because GitHub Copilot for Azure “lives within popular coding environments like Visual Studio Code, it can help developers manage cloud resources, deploy applications, and even troubleshoot issues without leaving their primary workspace,” VentureBeat explains.

To speed the development process even further, Microsoft is also introducing AI app templates, which let users “deploy in as little as five minutes” using “a variety of models, frameworks, programming languages, and solutions from popular AI toolchain vendors such as Arize, LangChain, LlamaIndex and Pinecone,” according to Microsoft.

A separate VentureBeat article discusses how Q Developer, integrated with the multi-model Amazon Bedrock, has become an inline chat assistant: “Simply highlighting text will bring up a list of new Q Developer actions as options, including ‘Optimize this code,’ ‘Add comments,’ or ‘Write tests.’”

The inline chat feature, powered by Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, “eliminates the need for developers to switch between chat and code windows,” VentureBeat reports, explaining that it’s “free to start but with monthly limits on certain actions” (versus the $19 monthly Pro tier).

GitHub Copilot for Azure subscriptions start at $10 per month (or $100 per year) for individual developers and goes up from there (to $40 per seat for enterprise use).