Generative AI has captured the world's attention but making funny natural language answers is one thing; writing genuine, secure, production-quality software is something else entirely. Yet, GitHub's own GitHub Copilot Chat does just this. It provides developers on the GitHub platform with real-time guidance, tips, troubleshooting, remediation, and solutions all tailored to their specific challenges.

Last year GitHub research found developers using GitHub Copilot were producing code 55% faster. Speed doesn't automatically imply "good" but today's new research from GitHub finds there is no compromise. In fact, 85% of developers felt more confident in their code quality when authoring code with GitHub Copilot and GitHub Copilot Chat. Further, code reviews were more actionable and were completed 15% faster with GitHub Copilot Chat. And, 88% of developers reported maintaining their valuable flow state with GitHub Copilot Chat because they felt less frustrated, more focused, and they enjoyed coding more.

GitHub VP of product Mario Rodriguez said, “We know there’s a difference between doing something fast and doing something well. We built GitHub Copilot and GitHub Copilot Chat to improve the lives of developers by helping them focus, keeping them in the flow, and empowering them to find more joy in their work. The results have shown that these AI tools are doing that and more—we look forward to building what’s next.”

To ensure their research was scientific, GitHub needed to quantify code quality. The company explains it developed a rubric of five metrics that it uses internally on its own code, and which also aligns with academic and industry standards. Specifically, these metrics were:

• Readable: Code that is difficult to read makes it more challenging to maintain, improve, and document.
• Reusable: Code reuse is a cornerstone of developer collaboration. It saves time and energy, breaks down silos, and creates consistency as a whole.
• Concise: The less repetitive the code is, the easier it’ll be to read, understand, and build upon. Complex code can lead to bugs and issues that will be tough to remediate.
• Maintainable: Well-maintained code means that developers minimize dependencies. Maintainable code also impacts developers' ability to search and practice code reuse.
• Resilient: Resilient code will maintain its functionality (or at least have minimal disruption) if there are errors. This goes a long way toward ensuring that code will, simply put, work.

The study investigated whether GitHub Copilot and GitHub Copilot Chat would produce code that passed unit testing, reduced the time required to review the code because it adhered to quality standards and readability, and improved the perceived quality of the code produced.

GitHub's research found that in every one of these measures, developers felt their coding improved when using GitHub Copilot. Overall, developers reported an increase in confidence about their code because it is more concise, maintainable, resilient, error-free, and readable while using the GitHub assistive technologies than without.

Some feedback from study participants says:

• “The code was so clean, I could just look at the code, know what was going on, and bring it over fairly easily to my codebase. So, I felt the code quality was very clean and easy to understand. When I was doing the pull request review using Copilot, I saw how good it was at generating proper error handling code.” said a Senior Software Engineer at a Fortune 500 company
• “One of the more actionable comments I received was related to conceptual understanding of my code–I want other developers to be able to understand what I'm doing, so this was good feedback.” - Software Engineer

• Because I’ve had industry experience for over a decade, I usually prefer coding with a notepad or a simplistic platform and Copilot Chat was a really useful tool for checking basic things without me needing to go to Google or Stack Overflow. And Copilot has a pretty neat syntax edition.” - Senior Systems Validation Engineer

The previous research found the majority of developers using GitHub Copilot reported feeling more fulfilled; this year, the study shows 88% of participants similarly felt less frustrated and more focused.

For individual developers through to enterprise teams, there's a clear benefit in leveraging GitHub's Copilot range; happier, more productive developers, producing high-quality code faster can only lead to greater productivity, more features, and less technical debt.