GitHub today announced a brand new product called GitHub Spark alongside updates to GitHub Copilot. GitHub Spark is an AI-powered tool that enables anyone to create mini web apps (sparks) using natural language, even without programming or deployment knowledge.
GitHub describes GitHub Spark as follows:
"It always starts with an idea. As children, we have thousands of them - some silly, some crazy. Today, we"re introducing GitHub Spark, a product that lets you try them all. Powered by natural language, it sets the stage for our vision to help 1 billion people become developers. This is about fun and personal software, not enterprise productivity apps."
GitHub Spark features interactive previews, revision variants, automatic history, and model selection for development. It can be used from both desktop and mobile devices. Spark has three tightly integrated components:
- An NL-based editor for easily describing and refining app ideas.
- A managed runtime environment that hosts sparks, providing data storage, theming, and access to LLMs.
- A PWA-enabled dashboard for managing and launching sparks from anywhere.
Sparks created using GitHub Spark can be shared with others with read-only or read-write permissions. Users can choose from different models, including Claude Sonnet 3.5, GPT-4o, o1-preview, and o1-mini.
In the coming months, GitHub will be updating GitHub Spark in the following areas:
- Expanding the collaboration modalities (e.g. a public gallery, allowing users to perform a semantic merge of changes that someone made in a fork of their spark, multi-player)
- Expanding the editor surface (e.g. providing an “x-ray mode” that allows summarizing and adjusting precise behaviors of the app)
- Expanding the runtime environment (e.g. more built-in components, better integration with 3rd party services, enabling file storage and vector search).
You can sign-up for the GitHub Spark technical preview here. With GitHub Spark, creating and sharing mini web apps becomes as easy as writing a simple text sentence. This innovative tool has the potential to democratize software development and empower a new generation of creators.