Microsoft has launched several new AI-powered tools designed to improve the developer experience as well as the brand new GitHub Copilot for Azure, a coding assistant that will be embedded in popular development environments like Visual Studio Code.
Amanda Silver, CVP of Product for Microsoft’s Developer Division, said in an interview with VentureBeat that developers are faced with a growing number of tools that are leading to “cognitive overload,” hence the introduction of what should hopefully be a simpler process.
Quantifying the added stress that an excess of tools brings, Microsoft revealed switching can cost developers up to 23 minutes each time, which adds up over the course of a week.
Microsoft wants to simplify developers’ lives
To coincide with the announcement and the coding platform’s recent series of announcements, GitHub’s CPO Mario Rodriguez noted that the future workload of developers will center around integrating AI into all elements of software.
By introducing new complexities, like prompt engineering, model evaluation and managing AI model outcomes, GitHub’s consensus, supported by a growing number of studies, is that artificial intelligence would change existing roles and introduce new ones, rather than replace human workers.
The company has also introduced new AI App Templates to allow developers to deploy artificial intelligence applications in “as little as five minutes.” Azure AI’s selection of models have also been extended to GitHub via GitHub Models, which is now in preview – users can compare model performance, experiment, and mix-and-match a open and proprietary models for free.
More broadly, a number of other important announcements were made at GitHub Universe, including the introduction of new models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Gemini 1.5 Pro to Copilot.
