“GitHub Copilot is not just a developer AI assistant, it's an enabler for the entire development team; and it’s benefits will only increase with the GA of GitHub Copilot Enterprise.”
Over the last few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of wizarding with Lars Klint as we delivered a series of GitHub Copilot Immersion and Accelerator workshops at customers like Greenstone and nib. Having had access to the beta for GitHub Copilot Enterprise, which has just become Generally Available, and the constant stream of enhancements for GitHub Copilot meant these recent workshops were an evolution on what we’d delivered in the past.
Our usual emphasis on setting context, being polite to your AI assistant(s)*, prompt crafting and learning through demonstrations and hands-on labs remained the same. Directing Copilot on what you needed became easier with the addition of slash commands like ‘/doc', ‘/tests’ and Copilot being more embedded into the GitHub.com experience. However, where we saw the graduation of Copilot as its capabilities grew was from Copilot being a Developer focused assistant to a being a much more versatile development team assistant, being extremely valuable to product owners, Q&A team members, project managers, and platform engineers as well as software magicians.
Copilot immersion session with nib
These workshops are full of priceless experiences and reactions from attendees. I always get a buzz of out the reaction that product owners, PM’s and QA/test team members get when they see how comprehensive the PR summary is during our Copilot Enterprise demos; The old dev team lead in me is still surprised at how thorough Copilot Enterprise’s summation of PR’s is, even though I’m the one driving the demo. The reaction of the product owner who’s now realised they can go into GitHub and ask Copilot to explain a block of code for them is just as satisfying as the glint in the eye of the senior developer who realises when one less query they’ll field on their code or progress today; so they’ll be able to spend more time uninterrupted in their IDE. For junior developers there’s also the realisation that they can get the help and guidance they’re looking for without disturbing the senior dev again.
"The old dev team lead in me is still surprised at how thorough Copilot Enterprise’s summation of PR’s is, even though I’m the one driving the demo."
And when I talk about development teams, I mean that in the broadest sense from application development teams, data engineering and science teams, platform, SRE and cloudops teams; any team whose function or purpose is founded on code benefits from GitHub Copilot. There’s just as much value for the cloudops engineer who can get a quick start of their Azure Terraform code for that next project, and sure they may also realise the same can be said for maintaining their legacy AWS terraform too. [Yes, I do like to stir up the AWS camp with Azure stickers at these workshops; and a ‘never accept the status quo’ allegiance to Azure.]
GitHub Copilot workshop at Greenstone Financial Services
If there’s one thing we see throughout our workshops, time and time again, is just how invaluable Copilot can be for helping every member of the development team maintain their flow, improve their confidence and ultimately their happiness whilst being more productive. With GitHub Copilot for Enterprises ability to tap into organisational knowledge and best practices, I expect the efficiency gains will continue as well as the invaluable sense of accomplishment and happiness that we all get when we’re in the zone to grow.
I’m keen to see where GitHub Copilot Enterprise takes us next, and how our workshops continue to evolve, but for now I’ll be loading in our GitHub COE material as the foundation for our organisational knowledge and best practices; the knowledge base functionality really caught my attention.
At Arkahna, we believe that every line of code represents an opportunity. That's why we're dedicated to guiding you through the GitHub landscape, helping you harness its full potential for innovation, collaboration, and success with the strategic integration of GitHub Copilot. Get in touch if you’d like to hear more about our Arkahna GitHub Elements adoption program for GitHub, or our GitHub Copilot Accelerate program.
* Yep, that’s right being polite in your prompts leads to more collaborative and helpful outputs. It comes down to LLM’s being trained on human conversations, and that tone is reciprocated in their responses. Why Using a Polite Tone with AI Matters (microsoft.com)