Today’s goal is simple; share the experience, and my personal reviews, of how the Copilot Workspace is, so far. Please note, this is under active development and can change a ton still, as time goes by. You can take a look at the progress on edg3/NovelReact, if it interests you.

Starting off, spend a few minutes chatting with Copilot to plan your idea for a project. You can go into as much detail as you want, and it can organise a starting template for you to work with. Starting with my simple testing plan idea, as I’m trying to become a published author still:

I’d like to make a React Android app from scratch, that can also be deployed on iOS devices, that allows a user to write a novel using a local sqlite database as storage in the internal app folder and can export a word document of the novel. I want the data structure to have Novel as the base book with description, Paragraph which can be marked as a chapter title, or Paragraph as the text inside the novel itself, all paragraphs with a control for how they are ordered, and a way to show off the word count from paragraphs that aren’t chapters to the user. I’d love to learn the entire experience for building the app from scratch and getting the structure in as fast as possible.

My first query

Running a brainstorm, it shares tasks to go through to complete the desired project. Simple, understandable, steps to achieve the desired outcome. You can choose what steps to add to your plan from the suggestions, then choose from suggestions to add, or even ask your own.

Then, once ready to start the actual work, we can go with Generate plan.

Copilot then analyses all the steps, makes a planned structure you can use, and you will see on the side you now have uncommitted changes.

One thing to note, you can adjust it as you want by talking to copilot more. Once you’re happy with the steps and structure, you can choose to implement the solution for you.

As a side note, when you haven’t created the project yet, you can slowly adjust and update the files. It won’t necessarily have your repository name, but you can even ask for changes to make it the right structure for the first commit.

Each adjustment Copilot analyses the text, decides what changes are needed, then implements them. Then one can create the repository you’d like to use.

The start of the project gets created for you; in the structure you desired. You can take a look at NovelReact if you’d like, the first commits are what I’m testing, first.

As a note, the machine I’m doing this one didn’t have node.js yet. Their guide at least helps get what’s needed up and running, I used the installer for ease. The other thing I needed for the React dev on my desktop, was Android Studio as was recommended. Note, it took only a few minutes to get the base structure started for the project, I then had delays getting packages and installing things, and in VSCode it even suggested the base .gitignore for me.

Using the readme steps, after I got my environment ready to run a React app, I got a bit stuck. It’s definitely a great way to get the project ready ‘from scratch.’ There will be more to show through the Copilot Workspace integration in VSCode, will leave it till next week I’d guess, will spend time testing it out. My delays were due to, for the first time, installing all the libraries I know I need for the React app development.

I didn’t spend more than around an hour yesterday morning, and didn’t continue after work, but it’s starting to enter the first test. I’ll share more of the experience this weekend. Yes, I’m doing NaNoWriMo-esque November, but I’m demotivated a little on the ideas I had, so I’m unsure of the progress I will make there.