Microsoft has announced that GitHub Copilot is now integrated with Data Wrangler, an extension for VS Code for viewing, cleaning, and preparing data.
By integrating GitHub Copilot capabilities into the tool, users will now be able to clean and transform data in VS Code with natural language prompts. It will also be able to provide suggestions of how to fix errors in data transformation code.
According to Microsoft, one of the current limitations of using AI for exploratory data analysis is that the AI often lacks context of the data, leading to more generalized responses. Further, the process of verifying that the generated code is correct can be a very manual and time-consuming process.
The integration of Data Wrangler and GitHub Copilot addresses these issues because it allows the user to provide GitHub Copilot with data context, enabling the tool to generate code for a specific dataset. It also provides a preview of the behavior of the code, which allows users to visually validate the response.
Some examples of how GitHub Copilot can be used in Data Wrangler include formatting a datetime column, removing columns with over 40% missing values, or fixing an error in a data transformation — all using natural language prompts.
Using this new integration will require having the Data Wrangler VS Code extension, the GitHub Copilot VS code extension, and an active GitHub Copilot subscription.
Microsoft also announced that this is just the first of many Copilot enhancements planned for Data Wrangler, and additional functionality will be added in the future.
