Thread by @Wattenberger

so excited to share with you all: a new @GitHubNext addition to Copilot Labs...

✨ Code Brushes ✨

We wondered how we could make editing your code feel as tactile and easy as paint with a brush in Photoshop?

writeup: githubnext.com/projects/code-…

and 🧵

we added a toolbox full of "brushes" to VSCode - I'll talk about a few specific ones.

Sometimes, you run across some code and have to stop to scratch your head. What if you could make code "more readable" with a click?

often, the types I'm using are pretty straightforward - what if those could be auto-generated?

here's a fun one! sometimes I end up banging my head against a bug, to realize that it's as simple as a typo. Could we have a brush that detects those?

I'm often changing code between "debugging" and "clean" states, like peppering log statements everywhere.

Seems like something a computer could do for us, right?

for those "what the heck is going on here?!" moments, we've added a brush that splits the code into steps and explains each chunk.

often, I'll remember that there's _something_ I need to do to make code more robust, but it's hard to remember exactly what. Really looking forward to using this "make more robust" brush

and the last one I'll share is.. anything! We have no idea what all of the use cases are, so we left it up to you to make custom brushes on the fly. For example, "make this form more accessible"

It's important to me that we focus on ✨ empowering ✨ developers instead of automating them, and this is one exploration that came out of that focus. We would love to hear what brushes you find useful!

the actual write-up:
githubnext.com/projects/code-…

one similar theme to "empowering" vs "automating" that sticks in my head is the concept of a "tool" vs a "machine" (brought up by @geoffreylitt)