GitLab 16.0 provides AI-powered coding for free
The GitLab team has released the May update of the software development platform. The major release GitLab 16.0 brings over 55 innovations and devotes itself again to the AI-supported code proposals that reached the open beta phase in the previous release. Now users of the free edition of GitLab.com can also use the feature. In addition, the Value Streams Dashboard for insights into metrics has reached general availability and new GitLab SaaS Runners can be used for Linux and Apple Silicon.
Code Suggestions Beta is more articulate and free
AI-powered code suggestions dubbed Code Suggestions have been available for GitLab’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) flavor since version 15.9. Depending on the respective prompt, GitLab can offer complete code snippets as well as complete a line or create a function. Suggestions can be accepted with the Tab key.
Initially only available to Ultimate users in a closed beta program, version 15.11 made the beta program available to Premium users as well. Now GitLab is going one step further and also lets users of the free SaaS edition participate in the beta feature. GitLab explicitly states that this applies during the beta phase. In addition, Code Suggestions can now handle other programming languages and thus includes 13 languages: C/C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Kotlin and TypeScript.
A dedicated blog post provides more details on the new feature. Accordingly, code suggestions should protect the security of entered source code within GitLab’s enterprise cloud infrastructure and not use it in the form of training data. If you want to follow GitLab’s additional work on the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning, you will find it in another blog entry.
Value Streams Dashboard and Accelerated SaaS Runner
In addition, the GitLab team has also promoted other features. For example, the Value Streams Dashboard has reached general availability and is therefore available for Ultimate users of GitLab.com as well as self-managed GitLab instances. The dashboard aims to provide strategic insights into software development lifecycle metrics to help decision makers identify trends.
The Value Streams Dashboard shows software lifecycle metrics.
(Image: GitLab)
For users of all SaaS versions, GitLab has doubled both vCPU and RAM for all GitLab SaaS Runners on Linux – which should lead to accelerated pipelines and increased productivity. Premium and Ultimate users of the SaaS variant can also use GPU-enabled SaaS Runners under Linux, which should particularly benefit data scientists with compute-intensive workloads. A beta version of GitLab SaaS Runner for Apple Silicon (M1) is now available for Premium and Ultimate users, which should offer a significant performance advantage.
Punctual major release
GitLab follows semantic versioning, which is why version 16.0 is a major release. In addition, the current release corresponds to the GitLab release cycle, according to which a new major release appears every year in May. A new minor version is released monthly, while patch updates are made as needed.
The GitLab blog describes all the highlights in version 16.0 in detail.
(May)
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