Top 5 coding challenges (and how to solve them with AI)

It can be hard to get started with an AI coding assistant. You might have even wondered how GitHub Copilot can help. Well, good news! We wrote a blog that specifically talks about what GitHub Copilot can do, with real-world examples. It outlines a host of ways that developers use Copilot to improve productivity and free up time to focus on the creative parts of their job they most enjoy. Today, we’ll explore five common developer pain points and show you how Copilot can help make these a little less painful.

And since GitHub Copilot is available for free, you can even give these a try on your own! So let’s jump in and get started.

Writing unit tests

Writing unit tests is a necessary step to making sure your code does what you want it to, and, just as important, not what it shouldn’t. Writing good unit tests requires knowing the limits, edge cases, and potential failures in your code. In short, you need to know the code to test it well. Since Copilot understands the code you’re working on, it’s great at ferreting out edge cases to create tests.

To do this, you can select the code in your IDE, right-click, and use the context menu. Of course, you’ll need to use an IDE that supports Copilot and install the extension. Alternatively, you can enter /tests as a command in Copilot Chat to put it to work. For additional guidance on creating unit tests, see this blog about creating unit tests and this sample of Copilot prompts.

Refactoring code

It’s a continuous struggle to make code cleaner, more performant, and more maintainable. Often, developers are asked to do this without changing what the code does.This is the root of refactoring code—improving the quality without changing the functionality. Depending on the scale of the codebase and the changes to make, this can mean cleaning up a single method, all the way up to rewriting several files at the same time.

The easiest way to get started is to ask Copilot Chat if it has suggestions to improve your code. You can highlight specific sections or provide it with specific context by using the #file variable in your prompt. If you want more details, we have docs on using GitHub Copilot for refactoring your code, as well as sample prompts for improving code readability and optimizing performance. 

Debugging code

We’ve all been there—you have a section of code that’s spitting out an error and don’t know how to fix it. And then, when you try to fix it, and just find more errors! How can you stop this slippery slope?

One way is to ask GitHub Copilot for a lifeline. Select the code that’s causing problems and either use the context menu or use the slash command /fix in Copilot Chat. You can also just ask Copilot Chat why something isn’t working and it will try to uncover some possible causes. To learn more, here’s a sample prompt and tutorial for debugging invalid JSON.

Explaining and documenting code

Sometimes you’re given a chunk of code that you don’t know anything about, and need to get up to speed quickly. Or maybe you’re coming back to code you wrote and don’t quite remember what you were thinking (possibly from too many caffeine-infused late nights). Either way, you can use GitHub Copilot to give you a brief summary of the code and explain what it’s doing, even if you don’t know the language!

To use this feature, select some code and either use the context menu or the /explain slash command in Copilot Chat. For sample prompts, check out our docs on explaining legacy code and on explaining complex logic.

Translating code to a new language

It’s unavoidable. Sometimes code needs to be updated to a new, more familiar language—for example, from a legacy language such as COBOL to a modern language more people can maintain. This goes hand-in-hand with asking Copilot to explain and document code. You can take Copilot’s explanation and ask it to suggest code in the target language that accomplishes the same tasks. This will give you a jumping-off point for your new codebase.

This is an example of just how powerful Copilot can become as you take the individual building blocks of its capability and put them together.

What will you use Copilot for?

These are just some of the most common ways that developers are finding Copilot useful. But it’s capable of a lot more. How are you using Copilot and finding it helpful? Let us know in the comments—maybe you’ll share something no one has even thought of before.

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✨ This newsletter was written by Dylan Birtolo and produced by Gwen Davis. ✨