At its annual GitHub Universe conference in San Francisco on Monday, GitHub announced Copilot Workspace, a dev environment that taps what GitHub describes as 'Copilot-powered agents' to help developers brainstorm, plan, build, test and run code in natural language. Jonathan Carter, head of GitHub Next, GitHub's software R&D team, pitches Workspace as somewhat of an evolution of GitHub's AI-powered coding assistant Copilot into a more general tool, building on recently introduced capabilities like Copilot Chat, which lets developers ask questions about code in natural language. 'Through research, we found that, for many tasks, the biggest point of friction for developers was in getting started, and in particular knowing how to approach a [coding] problem, knowing which files to edit and knowing how to consider multiple solutions and their trade-offs,' Carter said. 'So we wanted to build an AI assistant that could meet developers at the inception of an idea or task, reduce the activation energy needed to begin and then collaborate with them on making the necessary edits across the entire corebase.'...