As an Atlassian customer, you have more than one way to bring AI into your development workflow – via GitHub Copilot or via Rovo Dev.
If your code lives in Bitbucket but your team uses GitHub Copilot, you can use GitHub Copilot with your Bitbucket repositories in VS Code (or other supported editors). With this approach, you can manage your code in Bitbucket while getting AI coding assistance with Copilot in your IDE.
Another option is Rovo Dev: Atlassian’s context‑aware AI agent for developers. It connects with Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and GitHub, helping with planning, code generation, code review, and automating repetitive tasks. This is the most integrated way to bring AI into your Bitbucket workflow.
In this blog, we’ll show you how to:
- Use GitHub Copilot with your Bitbucket repositories in VS Code (or other supported editors).
- Bring Atlassian context into your workflow with Rovo Dev and native Bitbucket AI features.
- Get a peek into Atlassian’s developer AI roadmap.
Set up GitHub Copilot in VS Code for Bitbucket repositories
Let’s start by installing VS Code and the Copilot extension. These are intended to be general instructions. Please review the extension link below for installation and configuration details.
- If you don’t have VS Code, download it here.
- Get into VS Code, and install the GitHub Copilot extension for VS Code. (this extension is also compatible with Jetbrains IDEs, or text editors like Vim/Neovim – the full list is in the link)
- Enable the extension and configure it to your preferences.
Use GitHub Copilot with your Bitbucket repositories
GitHub Copilot runs in your IDE, which means you can use Copilot with any hosting provider, including Bitbucket. You don’t have to migrate your repositories to GitHub.
Here are step by step instructions on how to use Copilot with Bitbucket repositories.
- Clone your Bitbucket repositories locally
- Open the Bitbucket repository in VS Code with GitHub Copilot enabled.
- Now, when you write code, you can use all the Copilot features in VS Code linked to your Bitbucket repositories.
- Once you’re done writing code, you can push changes to Bitbucket and open a pull request.
Use AI capabilities in Bitbucket (with Rovo Dev)
Once code is pushed into Bitbucket Cloud, you can continue to use AI features within Bitbucket to help you with the code review process and CI/CD.
Some of these features are native to Bitbucket, while some require a Rovo Dev subscription. Start a free 30 day trial of Rovo Dev to try out all our AI capabilities.
Requires a Rovo Dev subscription:
- Speed up code review cycles with AI code review: To accelerate code reviews, Rovo Dev Code Reviewer will leave comments in your code and provide suggestions for improvement based on syntax and code conventions.
- Troubleshoot build failures with AI: Stop sifting through hundreds of lines of logs. Rovo Dev can review your logs, diagnose what broke the build, and suggest the necessary steps to fix it.
- AI deployment summaries: Use AI to summarize information related to Pipelines deployments, including which Jira issues and commits were part of the deployment. Use this to draft release notes or review for future bug fixes.
Rovo Dev is also available in the IDE and the CLI.
Native in Bitbucket paid plans:
- Provide clear context with AI PR descriptions: AI analyzes your code changes and commit messages to craft a clear and concise PR description so your reviewers have proper context during review.
- AI chat powered by Rovo: With Rovo chat, you don’t have to context switch to find a design file, or project context in Confluence, or a file buried in a Jira issue. Just ask Rovo and you’ll get the answer you need, in-context, right within Bitbucket.
What we’re building next
We continue to build AI capabilities to simplify and accelerate developer workflows. Some of our key initiatives include:
- Generate code from Jira issues: For simpler tasks like removing feature flags or fixing vulnerabilities, you’ll soon be able to use Rovo Dev to generate code based on context in the Jira issue and automatically open a PR in Bitbucket or GitHub.
- Fix builds with AI: Building on our pipeline troubleshooting capability, Rovo Dev will also fix the build, and automatically open a PR for review.
- Agentic CI/CD: Rovo Dev will power agentic CI/CD in Bitbucket with natural language step definitions to simplify the process of building powerful pipelines.
Get access to current and upcoming capabilities with a free 30 day trial of Rovo Dev.