GitLab Duo Chat: Get to know productivity-boosting AI enhancements

At GitLab, we continuously strive to enhance your experience with GitLab Duo Chat, our AI-powered assistant designed to streamline your development workflows. In this article, we share a series of significant updates that bring even more power, precision, and functionality to GitLab Duo Chat.

Migration to Claude 3.5 Sonnet

We are thrilled to announce a major upgrade for GitLab Duo Chat: the migration of its underlying Large Language Model from Claude 3 Sonnet to the more advanced Claude 3.5 Sonnet. This new model brings substantial performance enhancements, offering superior accuracy, context-awareness, and efficiency in AI-driven conversations.

With Claude 3.5 Sonnet powering GitLab Duo Chat, users can expect more precise and relevant responses. This upgrade ensures Chat remains at the forefront of AI technology, helping your team work more effectively in their daily workflows.

Notice the code block syntax highlighting in Chat in VS Code.

Bringing the Slash Command Picker to Chat in the GitLab UI

To further improve the discovery of GitLab Duo Chat slash commands and make them more quickly accessible to our users, we’ve introduced the Slash Command Picker UI. Now, when you start typing a prompt with / in Chat in the GitLab UI, the available slash commands relevant to your current context will be automatically displayed.

This feature enhances your workflow and acts as the foundation for a growing platform of AI-powered capabilities that we plan to expand in the near future.

Root Cause Analysis integration

GitLab Duo Chat is gaining another powerful feature: Root Cause Analysis.

This integration allows you to maintain context within Chat while investigating failed pipeline jobs, making it easier to ask follow-up questions and explore the root causes of problems.

You can access Root Cause Analysis by clicking the "Troubleshoot" button at the end of the job log, or you can select the job log portions and then ask Chat with the /troubleshoot slash command. With this seamless integration, you have the tools you need to resolve issues more efficiently.

Fix code in the IDE

One of the latest enhancements to GitLab Duo Chat is the ability to ask it to fix selected code within your IDE. This feature, introduced in GitLab 17.3, is available in the Web IDE, VS Code, and JetBrains IDE. It allows you to make specific code fixes by selecting portions of code and using the /fix slash command.

For example, you can instruct Chat to:

• Fix grammar mistakes and typos with /fix grammar mistakes and typos.
• Address performance issues using /fix performance problems.
• Solve specific bugs or algorithm-related issues with commands like /fix duplicate database inserts or /fix race conditions.
• Resolve code compilation errors with /fix the build.

This feature is designed to help developers quickly resolve common coding issues and improve the quality of their code, all while staying within their familiar IDE environment.

Here is an example for fixing grammar mistakes and improving the language of (code) comments.

Here is an example for fixing C code to print the disk usage. Chat correctly suggests missing header includes and provides more help to avoid additional bugs. The source code is available in the GitLab Duo challenge project.

Explain Vulnerability now in GitLab Duo Chat

Another highly popular AI-powered feature, Explain Vulnerability, has been integrated into GitLab Duo Chat. This addition allows you to explore vulnerability details in depth while keeping your Chat context intact. You can ask follow-up questions and engage in more comprehensive discussions directly within the chat environment. You can access this feature by viewing a SAST vulnerability in your project’s Vulnerability Report.

Currently, this feature supports results from SAST scanners, including Advanced SAST, with plans to extend support to additional scanners soon.

What's next?

We're continuously improving GitLab Duo Chat. Some areas we're exploring include:

• Context is important. We’re prioritizing the integration of commits, pipeline jobs, and merge requests into Chat’s contextual scope. Additionally, we are looking into terminal assistance with Chat. This expansion will allow Chat to provide more informed and relevant responses based on a broader range of data.
• Introduce the /help slash command. To make navigating Chat’s AI-powered features even more intuitive, we started development on a /help slash command. This new feature will guide users through the available commands and capabilities for easier and faster access to the tools you need.
• Make Chat available in supported IDEs. You can follow the development work for Visual Studio in this epic.

We look forward to hearing your feedback on these enhancements. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to evolve GitLab Duo Chat.

Get started with GitLab Duo Chat today by signing up for a free 60-day trial.