GitLab Duo Chat released as part of GitLab 16.11
GitLab has announced that its AI assistant GitLab Duo Chat is now generally available as part of the GitLab 16.11 release.
GitLab Duo Chat can answer questions about issues, epics, code, errors, CI/CD configurations, or the GitLab platform itself. It can also refactor existing code and generate tests.
For instance, a developer onboarding onto a project could ask for general knowledge like understanding the CI/CD setup, learning the difference between an issue and an epic, resetting their GitLab password, and getting started with specific development frameworks.
“With Chat, you have an assistant ready to answer all of your onboarding questions, and soon you’re ready to dig into your first project,” GitLab wrote in a blog post.
Organizations can control which data the AI gets read access to at the project, sub-group, and group levels. GitLab also said that customer data isn’t used to train its AI models.
GitLab Duo Chat is available within GitLab and in popular IDEs like VS Code and JetBrains’ IDEs. It is offered as an add-on to GitLab Duo Pro, which costs $19/user/month.
“Whether you’re a developer or you’re managing the entire team, GitLab Duo Chat can empower you to take advantage of AI exactly where you need it throughout the software development lifecycle — all while helping you maintain code quality and security guardrails,” the company wrote.
Other new features in GitLab 16.11 include:
- Policy scoping, which allows compliance teams to set policy enforcement to a specific group of projects
- Product Analytics, including key usage and adoption data on users
- The ability for Enterprise Users to disable personal access tokens
- Autocompletion when inserting links to wiki pages
- A sidebar containing project information
In total, over 40 new features were added to GitLab 16.11. A full list of updates can be found in GitLab’s blog post here.