GitLab Duo Chat AI Assistant Launch & Upcoming jQuery 4.0: What Developers Need to Know

GitLab Duo Chat released

GitLab announced that its AI assistant Duo Chat is now officially available as part of GitLab 16.11.

Duo Chat can answer questions about issues, epics, code, errors, CI/CD configuration, or the GitLab platform itself; it can also refactor existing code and generate tests.

It helps new developers with onboarding topics such as CI/CD setup, differences between issues and epics, resetting passwords, and using specific development frameworks.

Organizations can control which data the AI reads at project, subgroup, and group levels, and GitLab states that customer data will not be used to train its AI models.

Duo Chat is available in GitLab, VS Code, and JetBrains IDEs as an add‑on to GitLab Duo Pro, priced at $19 per user per month.

Other new features in GitLab 16.11 include:

Policy scope allowing compliance teams to set policy enforcement for specific project groups.

Product analytics with key usage and adoption data.

Enterprise users’ ability to disable personal access tokens.

Autocomplete when inserting links to wiki pages.

Sidebar containing project information.

jQuery 4.0 is coming

Although modern JavaScript frameworks have reduced jQuery’s prominence, the OpenJS Foundation estimates that 90 % of websites still use it.

jQuery 4.0.0 is scheduled for a May release after a February beta, with the team and OpenJS conducting a “healthy web” audit to encourage site updates.

Security vulnerabilities and best‑practice guidelines list several reasons for developers to upgrade jQuery, including compliance requirements.

April 24 – JavaScript “Naked Day”

This day encourages web developers to strip JavaScript from their sites, promoting the “minimum power rule” – a W3C concept of using the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose.

Participants may even disable JavaScript in browsers to see how sites behave without it.

Reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40104842