How I would redesign Copilot Workspace
It is a task-oriented tool that lets you describe what you want to do within in a repository, and it will generate an editable plan of action, identify which files are relevant, and propose code changes to implement your requested changes.
Disclaimer: This project is very, very early stages and still evolving rapidly. My feedback will likely be outdated soon. I've worked previously with the GitHub Next team and I'm huge fans of them—they are brilliant.
TL;DR: Copilot Workspace is a great concept. But the UX and framing is entirely wrong and sets the wrong expectation for users. The current prototype is very slow (5+ minutes for one-line code changes) and the generated code is often buggy or has nothing to do with the specification. The generated plan is usually good. ChatGPT does a much better job in my head-to-head comparisons (assuming I already know exactly what code is relevant). I'm still optimistic of where it can go from here.
I don't want to spend much time talking about the performance or accuracy of the tool. It is powered by LLMs and it has all of the same consequences. That part will get better.
