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 such as Visual Studio Code.
Amanda Silver, CVP of Product for Microsoft’s Developer Division, said in an interview with Venture Beat that developers are faced with a growing number of tools that lead to ‘cognitive overload’, hence the introduction of what should hopefully be a simpler process.
To quantify the added stress that too many tools brings, Microsoft revealed that switching can cost developers up to 23 minutes at a time, adding up over the course of a week.
Microsoft wants to simplify developers’ lives
Coinciding with the announcement and the coding platform’s recent string of announcements, GitHub CPO Mario Rodriguez noted that the future developer workload will center around integrating AI into all elements of software.
By introducing new complexities such as rapid engineering, model evaluation and managing AI model results, GitHub’s consensus, supported by a growing body of research, is that artificial intelligence would change existing roles and introduce new ones, replacing human workers to replace.
The company also introduced new AI App Templates that allow developers to deploy artificial intelligence applications in “just five minutes.” Azure AI’s selection of models has also been expanded to GitHub via GitHub Models, which is now in preview. Users can compare model performance, experiment, and mix and match open and proprietary models for free.
More broadly, a number of other major announcements were made on GitHub Universe, including the release of new models such as Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Gemini 1.5 Pro for Copilot.