I test a lot of AI coding tools, and this stunning new OpenAI release just saved me days of work
David Gewirtz / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNETLast week, OpenAI quietly dropped a programming bombshell post on X/Twitter. It turns out you can now connect GitHub repos to Deep Research in ChatGPT. What makes this particularly interesting is that you can put ChatGPT Deep Research to work scanning that repo for all sorts of yummy nuggets of information. GitHub is an online resource owned by Microsoft that holds an enormous number of programming projects, both open source and proprietary. It’s used by teams to coordinate and track development. A GitHub repo is a repository for a given project. What Deep Research can now do is dig through the full source code for an entire software project and provide value. Also: The best AI for coding in 2025 (including two new top picks – and what not to use)Look, I have to come clean before we go on any further. I’ve tried this thing out. It can effectively produce an internal code review. This is very cool. I am seriously chuffed by what we can get this beastie to do for us. AIs creep me out, so why do I want to hug this one? My editor says, “That’s all part of their plan.” Seriously, this is some powerful mojo. Most of my biggest programming projects have been based on code acquisitions from other programmers. Digging through their code and deciphering what the living heck they were thinking throughout the code can be an excruciatingly time-consuming process. It’s not just about a line-for-line what-does-this-code-do sort of thing. It’s about how the project is architected. What are the various modules, and how do they interact? Where are their strengths, and where are their potent gotchas? What makes the UI function? What needs to be done to add functionality, remove functionality, or replace functionality? Also: How I used this AI tool to build an app with just one prompt – and you can tooDeep Research can now do this with GitHub repos. It is almost totally sweet. Almost is because of the restrictions. Let’s cover those first, before I show you the hoops I made this thing jump through. According to ChatGPT 4o, here are the limits for each of the subscription tiers. More