Vaadin Copilot Hilla

Vaadin Copilot comes built into the development mode of your application; you don’t need to install anything. If you have an existing project, make sure it’s running Vaadin 24.4 or later.

See how to Start a Project for more information. Be sure you add a Hilla view. Also, see how to Import to an IDE, and Run an Application.

Once your application is running, click the }> button to activate or deactivate Copilot.

Quick Step-by-Step Instructions

Copilot supersedes the previous development tools, and is activated via the same }> button that appears on top of your application in development mode. When activated, Copilot takes over the browser and disables interaction with the application until Copilot is deactivated.

Enable the keyboard shortcuts so that you can effortlessly enter and exit Copilot as you develop your application.

The Copilot UI consists of four main parts. Referring to the numbers in the graphic that follows, the ➀ Activation Button activates and deactivates Copilot, and hosts a popup menu with some configuration options. This is the only functionality available when Copilot is not activated. Once activated, Copilot offers additional functionality.

➁ Drawers are located to the left, right, and bottom edges of the browser window, and appear when you move the mouse close enough to those edges. Drawers are where you find most of the Copilot functionality tucked away by default.

Each Drawer contains ➂ Panels, with each representing a specific functionality. Each panel can be turned into a ➃ Floating Panel so that it doesn’t auto-hide with the Drawer, and can be moved, collapsed, and resized.

The ➄ Spotlight is a context-sensitive popup window with an input prompt. This is where you can give commands to the AI.

Copilot uses a plugin architecture which allows additional functionality to appear as panels. This includes tools such as Vaadin AppSec Kit, as well as third-party plugins.

You can rearrange components by using drag-and-drop. Drop zones will appear to visualize where components can be dropped. You can also use drag-and-drop on the Outline, and drag in new components from the Palette.

You can ask Copilot to do things for using a natural language prompt in the Spotlight popup. The AI does its best to fulfill your request, but in this early phase its abilities are limited; it makes mistakes sometimes. Think of it as a very helpful junior developer, who remembers a lot about topics you might have forgotten or not looked into yet, but is still very inexperienced and needs supervision. It’s slower than you on small tasks if you remember exactly how to do them. It’s faster if you’d need to look up how to do a task, or if it involves a lot of typing. Basically, be ready to fix minor mistakes, undo a whole change — and be prepared to be pleasantly surprised.

The AI knows a bit about your project and tech stack — and which components you’ve selected, if any. It tries to make use of that information when possible: for instance when you refer to a button, selected components, or similar items.

To learn how to use Copilot, you might start by trying to perform some small tasks. Below are suggestions of common tasks.

Try to do the following to make a button primary:

This type of task can be slow compared to making the change manually. However, it can be very useful when you don’t remember how to do it in the code.

Bootstrapping a new form or generating placeholder content can be very convenient. Try this:

Prompts can affect multiple components, and take context into account without being very specific in the prompt. To make those changes and addition, try these:

The AI may be able to help with UX considerations. Try these tasks:

When developing UIs, there’s a tendency to switch repeatedly between code and the browser to verify and tweak the results. You should be able to code when needed, and do changes directly in the UI when that feels more appropriate.

Vaadin Copilot aims to integrate seamlessly into your regular development workflow. This way you can switch back and forth between the code in your IDE and Copilot, depending on which is appropriate. However, this can pose a problem with being able to undo when two applications are changing the same files. Copilot considers the file on disk to be the source of truth. All changes are made to the file, then hot deployed to the browser.

To get full-fledged undo support, though, use the Vaadin plugin for IntelliJ. It makes all Copilot changes appear as if they were made within your IDE.

As a stop-gap when you’re not using the plugin, make sure the file being changed by Copilot is open in your IDE: the changes will be reloaded from the disk. This adds the operation to the undo stack so you can go back to the previous version. This approach can be difficult to manage when changing multiple files, and it’s easy to forget to open relevant files before using Copilot. Use version management (e.g., git) to revert changes. This requires you to commit often. Otherwise, undoing operations will be very coarse-grained.

These are some known limitations with using Copilot with Vaadin: