Before you modify existing code you should make sure you understand its purpose and how it currently works. Copilot can help you with this. Select the relevant code in your IDE's editor.

Feb 21, 2023 · Can I use github copilot to change code in my program that is already written? In chatgpt you can give code and tell it to change certain things about it and it gives you the code with the changes. But in copilot I only seem to be able to generate new code.

Feb 11, 2025 · Discover how to use GitHub Copilot to refactor your code and see samples of it in action. We’ve all been there—staring at a function that looks like it was written by an over-caffeinated goblin at 3 AM (maybe even your alter ego). You could pretend it doesn’t exist, or you could refactor it.

Copilot can help you modernize your legacy code by: Providing suggestions for refactoring the code to follow modern best practices. Generating documentation to help you understand how the code works. Generating tests to help you verify that your changes haven't introduced bugs.

Copilot uses history of the conversation to provide context. Remove past questions and responses from the history if they're not relevant. Or, start a new session if you want to change the context. Get more details about prompt engineering. Find practical examples of prompts to use with Copilot in the GitHub Copilot documentation.

Code completions - Start typing in the editor, and Copilot provides code suggestions that match your coding style and take your existing code into account. Next Edit Suggestions - Predict your next code edit with Copilot Next Edit Suggestions, aka Copilot NES.

Jan 22, 2025 · How GitHub Copilot helps you refactor and modernize legacy code. Modernizing legacy code can feel like an uphill battle, especially when you’re diving into unfamiliar languages like COBOL. But GitHub Copilot makes this process faster, smoother, and—dare I …

Learn how to get started with the GitHub Copilot extension to get AI-powered code suggestions in the editor, use chat conversations to refactor your code, and fix code errors with smart actions.

Feb 26, 2025 · Accept or reject individual chunks of code within a file. Can use existing version control. Adds a rollback experience to reset edited files to a previous state. Tracks all changes - proposed, accepted, dismissed, and manual edits made to the file. These checkpoints are retained until the user closes Visual Studio.

However, updating code manually can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. Fortunately, GitHub Copilot provides an intelligent solution to streamline code refactoring, making it faster, more efficient, and less error-prone. What is Code Refactoring? Code refactoring involves rewriting existing code without altering its external behavior.

Mar 17, 2025 · GitHub Copilot Chat can help you with code explanations, building out full minimum viable products (MVPs), writing tests, fixing errors in your terminals, and much more. To showcase the capabilities of Copilot Chat, we’re going to use it to create a graphical user interface (GUI) for our rock, paper, scissors game.

Discover ways that you can use GitHub Copilot to refactor your code. Copilot Chat can suggest ways to make your code easier to understand and maintain. Copilot Chat can suggest ways to fix issues identified by a code linter. Copilot Chat can suggest ways to speed up slow-running code.

Before you modify existing code you should make sure you understand its purpose and how it currently works. {% data variables.product.prodname_copilot_short %} can help you with this. Select the relevant code in your IDE's editor. {% data …

Apr 29, 2024 · Recently, I’ve found what feels like Copilot’s hidden gem: its “modify” feature. How does it work? It’s pretty simple. The “Modify with Copilot” feature enables you to ask Copilot to refactor some selected code with a prompt you enter to help it out.

Limitations. Multiple simultaneous edit sessions are not supported yet. The use of @workspace /new to scaffold a new project is not supported yet in an Edit session. For now, use Copilot Chat for the initial scaffolding. Although #codebase is great at finding relevant context for your query, subsequent generated edits are of widely varying quality. . Experiment with the …

Apr 1, 2025 · Copilot can and does make mistakes, so checkpoint your code frequently so you can roll back, and ensure that you have great unit test coverage (which of course Copilot can help you generate). Experiment with prompts and models. I love the fact that GitHub Copilot gives you access to a variety of models from Open AI, Anthropic and Google. They ...

Mar 25, 2024 · Unlike ChatGPT where you need to provide all the data to the model in the prompt window, by installing GitHub Copilot in your editor, the assistant is able to infer context from the code you’re working on. It then uses that context to provide code suggestions. We already know this, but what else can we do to give it additional context?

You can access GitHub Copilot in VS Code through the Chat view, directly in the editor, from the integrated terminal, and via AI-powered enhancements in the VS Code user interface. Tip If you don't yet have a Copilot subscription, you can use Copilot for free by signing up for the Copilot Free plan and get a monthly limit of completions and ...

Learn how to change the default LLM for Copilot code completion to a different model. By default, Copilot code completion uses the GPT 3.5 Turbo large language model (LLM). As an alternative, you can choose to use a model based on GPT 4o-mini.

Dec 27, 2024 · This generally happens when it has to refactor a large code file. It would remove the code but where it has to insert it, it will just insert an comment like this: // ...existing code... If you accept this code change, the original code will be lost. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights with us!

Copilot does not apply code-generation instructions for code completions. You can configure custom code-generation instructions by using the github.copilot.chat.codeGeneration.instructions setting. You can define custom instructions at the User or Workspace level, and you can also specify language-specific instructions.

Documenting your code is another way to improve the maintainability of your code. For information about using Copilot Chat to help you add useful comments to your code, see the example prompts in Documenting code. The responses shown in this article are examples.

May 5, 2022 · Right now if I want Copilot's suggestion on how to do something, it's best to start with a clean slate and a comment, maybe a method stub. It isn't as good at taking a comment and using it to offer suggestions for modifying an existing block of code.

Configuring automatic code review for repositories in an organization. In the upper-right corner of GitHub, select your profile photo, then click Your organizations. Next to the organization, click Settings. In the left sidebar, in the "Code, planning, and automation" section, click Repository, then click Rulesets.

Apr 4, 2025 · Copilot code review helps you offload basic reviews to a Copilot agent that finds bugs, potential performance problems, and even suggests fixes. This means you can start iterating on your code while waiting for a human review, helping you keep your code repositories more maintainable and focused on quality.