GitHub Copilot Workspace

I tried out Copilot Workspaces before they fixed the waitlist access check yesterday and it seems to work a lot better by running a multistep process and allowing the user to incrementally modify the plan and rerun code generation. The UI is similar to the code review interface except the file list on the left is generated from a plan and there's a bullet point list for each file of changes the plan generates. It enables a REPL loop where the AI code gens, the user tests the changes, then updates the file plans and reruns code generation again, creating and adding files as necessary. The end result is a PR with generated description or a commit direct to main. I'm excited for this next wave of AI coding agents but Amazon seems to have rushed this into production

Yeah to be clear I think Copilot Workspace is a great start. I wonder if the future is multi-modal though. Ignoring how obnoxious it would be to anyone near me, I could foresee narrating my stream of thoughts to the mic while using the keyboard to actually write code. It would still depend on me being able to accurately describe what I want, but it might free me from having to context switch to writing docs to hint the LLM.

> then realize that you yourself don't have a perfect idea of what exactly this feature should be I talked about it the last time that Copilot Workspaces reached the front page two days ago and that was, I don't think the value is in the code generation, but rather in the ability to capture our thought process. CW is currently a bottleneck in my opinion and I think the code generation will have to get pretty good before we can see the value in writing everything down vs just coding as we have always done.

I do think workspace by GitHub is a smart move. What is clear as day is, we don't have enough data to model how developers think and iterate to solve problems. With workspace, I see it as a way to capture structured data on how developers think. This is certainly a long game though. I think GitHub with MS money can continue to lose money on Copilot for the next 5 years to gather data. For other VC ventures, I don't think they can wait that long.