19 ms·

GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

564 points by net01 1y ago

r0ckarong 1y ago
Check in unreviewed slop straight into the codebase. Awesome.
- postalrat 1y ago
  Now developers can produce 20x the slop and refactor at 5x speed.
  - OutOfHere 1y ago
    In my experience in VSCode, Claude 3.7 produced more unsolicited slop, whereas GPT-4.1 didn't. Claude aggressively paid attention to type compatibility. Each model would have its strengths.
  - namaria 1y ago
    So a 4x slowdown?
- olex 1y ago
  > Once Copilot is done, it’ll tag you for review. You can ask Copilot to make changes by leaving comments in the pull request. To me, this reads like it'll be a good junior and open up a PR with its changes, letting you (the issue author) review and merge. Of course, you can just hit "merge" without looking at the changes, but then it's kinda on you when unreviewed stuff ends up in main.
  - tmpz22 1y ago
    A good junior has strong communication skills, humility, asks many good questions, has imagination, and a tremendous amount of human potential.
    - th0ma5 1y ago
      Has a point of view, a clear motive, ability to think holistically about things that are hard to digitize, get mad and clean up a bunch of stuff absolutely correctly because they're finally just "sick of all of this shit", or, conservatively isolates legacy code, studying it and creating buffering wrappers for the new system in pieces as the legacy issues are mitigated with a long term strategy. Each move is discussed with their peers. etc etc etc thank you for advocating sanity!
  - DeepYogurt 1y ago
    Management: "Why aren't you going faster now that the AI generates all the code and we fired half the dev team?"
- odiroot 1y ago
  I'm waiting for the first unicorn that uses just vibe coding.
  - erikerikson 1y ago
    I expect it to be a security nightmare
    - freeone3000 1y ago
      And why would that matter?
- timrogers 1y ago
  Copilot pushes its work to a branch and creates a pull request, and then it's up to you to review its work, approve and merge. Copilot literally can't push directly to the default branch - we don't give it the ability to do that - precisely because we believe that all AI-generated code (just like human generated code) should be carefully reviewed before it goes to production. (Source: I'm the product lead for Copilot coding agent.)
muglug 1y ago
> Copilot excels at low-to-medium complexity tasks Oh cool! > in well-tested codebases Oh ok never mind
- abraham 1y ago
  Have it write tests for everything and then you've got a well tested codebase.
  - eikenberry 1y ago
    You forgot the /s
  - danielbln 1y ago
    Caveat empor, I've seen some LLMs mock the living hell out of everything, to the point of not testing much of anything. Something to be aware of.
    - yen223 1y ago
      I've seen too many human operators do that too. Definitely a problem to watch out for
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway12361 1y ago
  In my experience it works well even without good testing, at least for greenfield projects. It just works best if there are already tests when creating updates and patches.
- lukehoban 1y ago
  As peer commenters have noted, coding agent can be really good at improving test coverage when needed. But also as a slightly deeper observation - agentic coding tools really do benefit significantly from good test coverage. Tests are a way to “box in” the agent and allow it to check its work regularly. While they aren’t necessary for these tools to work, they can enable coding agents to accomplish a lot more on your behalf. (I work on Copilot coding agent)
boomskats 1y ago
My buddy is at GH working on an adjacent project & he hasn't stopped talking about this for the last few days. I think I've been reminded to 'make sure I tune into the keynote on Monday' at least 8 times now. I gave up trying to watch the stream after the third authentication timeout, but if I'd known it was this I'd maybe have tried a fourth time.
- tmpz22 1y ago
  I’m always hesitant to listen to the line coders on projects because they’re getting a heavy dose of the internal hype every day. I’d love for this to blow past cursor. Will definitely tune in to see it.
  - dontlikeyoueith 1y ago
    >I’m always hesitant to listen to the line coders on projects because they’re getting a heavy dose of the internal hype every day. I'm senior enough that I get to frequently see the gap between what my dev team thinks of our work and what actual customers think. As a result, I no longer care at all what developers (including myself on my own projects) think about the quality of the thing they've built.
    - sethammons 1y ago
      These do not need to be mutually exclusive. Define the quality of the software in terms of customer experience and give developers ownership to improve those markers. You can think service level objectives. In many cases, this means pushing for more stable deployments which requires other quality improvements.
- unshavedyak 1y ago
  What specific keynote are they referring to? I'm curious, but thus far my searches have failed
  - babelfish 1y ago
jerpint 1y ago
These kinds of patterns allow compute to take much more time than a single chat since it is asynchronous by nature, which I think is necessary to get to working solutions on harder problems
- lukehoban 1y ago
  Yes. This is a really key part of why Copilot coding agent feels very different to use than Copilot agent mode in VS Code. In coding agent, we encourage the agent to be very thorough in its work, and to take time to think deeply about the problem. It builds and tests code regularly to ensure it understands the impact of changes as it makes them, and stops and thinks regularly before taking action. These choices would feel too “slow” in a synchronous IDE based experience, but feel natural in a “assign to a peer collaborator” UX. We lean into this to provide as rich of a problem solving agentic experience as possible. (I’m working on Copilot coding agent)
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
Scene_Cast2 1y ago
I tried doing some vibe coding on a greenfield project (using gemini 2.5 pro + cline). On one hand - super impressive, a major productivity booster (even compared to using a non-integrated LLM chat interface). I noticed that LLMs need a very heavy hand in guiding the architecture, otherwise they'll add architectural tech debt. One easy example is that I noticed them breaking abstractions (putting things where they don't belong). Unfortunately, there's not that much self-retrospection on these aspects if you ask about the quality of the code or if there are any better ways of doing it. Of course, if you pick up that something is in the wrong spot and prompt better, they'll pick up on it immediately. I also ended up blowing through $15 of LLM tokens in a single evening. (Previously, as a heavy LLM user including coding tasks, I was averaging maybe $20 a month.)
- falcor84 1y ago
  > LLMs need a very heavy hand in guiding the architecture, otherwise they'll add architectural tech debt I wonder if the next phase would be the rise of (AI-driven?) "linters" that check that the implementation matches the architecture definition.
  - dontlikeyoueith 1y ago
    And now we've come full circle back to UML-based code generation. Everything old is new again!
- candiddevmike 1y ago
  > I also ended up blowing through $15 of LLM tokens in a single evening. This is a feature, not a bug. LLMs are going to be the next "OMG my AWS bill" phenomenon.
  - Scene_Cast2 1y ago
    Cline very visibly displays the ongoing cost of the task. Light edits are about 10 cents, and heavy stuff can run a couple of bucks. It's just that the tab accumulates faster than I expect.
OutOfHere 1y ago
GitHub had this exact feature late last year itself, perhaps under a slightly different name.
- throwup238 1y ago
  Are you thinking if Copilot Workspaces? That seemed to drop off the Github changelog after February. I’m wondering if that team got reallocated to the copilot agent.
  - WorldMaker 1y ago
    Probably. Also this new feature seems like an expansion/refinement of Copilot Workspaces to better fit the classic Github UX: "assign an issue to Copilot to get a PR" sounds exactly like the workflow Copilot Workspaces wanted to have when it grew up.
- timrogers 1y ago
  I think you're probably thinking of Copilot Workspace (<https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilot-workspace/ https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilo...>). Copilot Workspace could take a task, implement it and create a PR - but it had a linear, highly structured flow, and wasn't deeply integrated into the GitHub tools that developers already use like issues and PRs. With Copilot coding agent, we're taking all of the great work on Copilot Workspace, and all the learnings and feedback from that project, and integrating it more deeply into GitHub and really leveraging the capabilities of 2025's models, which allow the agent to be more fluid, asynchronous and autonomous. (Source: I'm the product lead for Copilot coding agent.)
taurath 1y ago
> Copilot excels at low-to-medium complexity tasks in well-tested codebases, from adding features and fixing bugs to extending tests, refactoring, and improving documentation. Bounds bounds bounds bounds. The important part for humans seems to be maintaining boundaries for AI. If your well-tested codebase has the tests built thru AI, its probably not going to work. I think its somewhat telling that they can't share numbers for how they're using it internally. I want to know that Microsoft, the company famous for dog-fooding is using this day in and day out, with success. There's real stuff in there, and my brain has an insanely hard time separating the trillion dollars of hype from the usefulness.
- twodave 1y ago
  I feel like I saw a quote recently that said 20-30% of MS code is generated in some way. [0] In any case, I think this is the best use case for AI in programming—as a force multiplier for the developer. It’s for the best benefit of both AI and humanity for AI to avoid diminishing the creativity, agency and critical thinking skills of its human operators. AI should be task oriented, but high level decision-making and planning should always be a human task. So I think our use of AI for programming should remain heavily human-driven for the long term. Ultimately, its use should involve enriching humans’ capabilities over churning out features for profit, though there are obvious limits to that. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-as-30percent-of-microsoft-code-is-written-by-ai.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...
  - tmpz22 1y ago
    How much of that is protobuf stubs and other forms of banal autogenerate code?
    - twodave 1y ago
      Updated my comment to include the link. As much as 30% specifically generated by AI.
      - 1y ago
softwaredoug 1y ago
Is Copilot a classic case of slow megacorp gets outflanked by more creative and unhindered newcomers (ie Cursor)? It seems Copilot could have really owned the vibe coding space. But that didn’t happen. I wonder why? Lots of ideas gummed up in organizational inefficiencies, etc?
- ilaksh 1y ago
  This is a direct threat to Cursor. The smarter the models get, the less often programmers really need to dig into an IDE, even one with AI in it. Give it a couple of years and there will be a lot of projects that were done just by assigning tasks where no one even opened Cursor or anything.
theusus 1y ago
I have been so far disappointed by copilot's offerings. It's just not good enough for anything valuable. I don't want you to write my getter and setter. And call it a day.
- rvz 1y ago
  I think we expected disappointment with this one. (I expected it at least)[0] But the upgraded Copilot was just in response to Cursor and Winsurf. We'll see. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43904611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43904611
asadm 1y ago
In the early days on LLM, I had developed an "agent" using github actions + issues workflow[1], similar to how this works. It was very limited but kinda worked ie. you assign it a bug and it fired an action, did some architect/editing tasks, validated changes and finally sent a PR. Good to see an official way of doing this. 1. https://github.com/asadm/chota https://github.com/asadm/chota
nodja 1y ago
I wish they optimized things before adding more crap that will slow things down even more. The only thing that's fast with copilot is the autocomplete, it sometimes takes several minutes to make edits on a 100 line file regardless of the model I pick (some are faster than others). If these models had a close to 100% hit rate this would be somewhat fine, but going back and forth with something that takes this long is not productive. It's literally faster to open claude/chatgpt on a new tab and paste the question and code there and paste it back into vscode than using their ask/edit/agent tools. I've cancelled my copilot subscription last week and when it expires in two weeks I'll mostly likely shift to local models for autocomplete/simple stuff.
- brushfoot 1y ago
  My experience has mostly been the opposite -- changes to several-hundred-line files usually only take a few seconds. That said, months ago I did experience the kind of slow agent edit times you mentioned. I don't know where the bottleneck was, but it hasn't come back. I'm on library WiFi right now, "vibe coding" (as much as I dislike that term) a new tool for my customers using Copilot, and it's snappy.
  - nodja 1y ago
    Here's a video of what it looks like with sonnet 3.7. https://streamable.com/rqlr84 https://streamable.com/rqlr84 The claude and gemini models tend to be the slowest (yes, including flash). 4o is currently the fastest but still not great.
    - NicuCalcea 1y ago
      For me, the speed varies from day to day (Sonnet 3.7), but I've never seen it this slow.
- BeetleB 1y ago
  Several minutes? Something is seriously wrong. For most models, it takes seconds.
joelthelion 1y ago
I don't know, I feel this is the wrong level to place the AI at this moment. Chat-based AI programming (such as Aider) offers more control, while being almost as convenient.
sync 1y ago
Anthropic just announced the same thing for Claude Code, same day: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/github-actions https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/github-action...
- Yenrabbit 1y ago
  And Google's version: https://jules.google https://jules.google
OutOfHere 1y ago
Which model does it use? Will this let me select which model to use? I have seen a big difference in the type of code that different models produce, although their prompts may be to blame/credit in part.
- qwertox 1y ago
  I assume you can select whichever one you want (GPT-4o, o3-mini, Claude 3.5, 3.7, 3.7 thinking, Gemini 2.0 Flash, GPT=4.1 and the previews o1, Gemini 2.5 Pro and 04-mini), subject to the pricing multiplicators they announced recently [0]. Edit: From the TFA: Using the agent consumes GitHub Actions minutes and Copilot premium requests, starting from entitlements included with your plan. [0] https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/managing-copilot/monitoring-usage-and-entitlements/about-premium-requests https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/managing-copilot/monitori...
- timrogers 1y ago
  At the moment, we're using Claude 3.7 Sonnet - but we're keeping our options open to experiment with other models and potentially bring in a model picker. (Source: I'm on the product team for Copilot coding agent.)
  - OutOfHere 1y ago
    Do you at least control the prompt? In my experience using Claude Sonnet 3.7 in GitHub Copilot extension in VSCode, the model produced hideously verbose code, completely unnecessary stuff. GPT-4.1 was a breath of fresh air.
  - ravedave5 1y ago
    I was trying to find information on this on the internet and couldn't find any, thanks for providing. Interestingly enough Copilot coding agent on github.com repeatedly could not complete css changes correctly, when I switched to Agent mode in the project IDE with Claude 3.7 it was able to complete it in one round, so I assumed that there was a different model.
shwouchk 1y ago
I played around with it quite a bit. it is both impressive and scary. most importantly, it tends to indiscriminately use dependencies from random tiny repos, and often enough not the correct ones, for major projects. buyer beware.
- yellow_lead 1y ago
  Given that PRs run actions in a more trusted context for private repos, this is a bit concerning.
  - timrogers 1y ago
    As we've built Copilot coding agent, we've put a lot of thought and work into our security story. One of the things we've done here is to treat Copilot's commits like commits from a first-time contributor to an open source project. When Copilot pushes changes, your GitHub Actions workflows won't run by default, and you'll have to click the "Approve and run workflows" button in the merge box. That gives you the chance to run Copilot's code before it runs in Actions and has access to your secrets. (Source: I'm on the product team for Copilot coding agent.)
    - yellow_lead 1y ago
      Nice! Thanks for that info
    - ThierryAbalea 1y ago
      The announcement https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilot-meet-the-new-coding-agent/ https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilo... seems to position GitHub Actions as a core part of the Copilot coding agent’s architecture. From what I understand in the documentation and your comment, GitHub Actions is triggered later in the flow, mainly for security reasons. Just to clarify, is GitHub Actions also used in the development environment of the agent, or only after the code is generated and pushed?
- PhilipRoman 1y ago
qwertox 1y ago
In hindsight it was a mistake that Google killed Google Code. Then again, I guess they wouldn't have put enough effort into it to develop into a real GitHub alternative. Now Microsoft sits on a goldmine of source code and has the ability to offer AI integration even to private repositories. I can upload my code into a private repo and discuss it with an AI. The only thing Google can counter with would be to build tools which developers install locally, but even then I guess that the integration would be limited. And considering that Microsoft owns the "coding OS" VS Code, it makes Google look even worse. Let's see what they come up with tomorrow at Google I/O, but I doubt that it will be a serious competition for Microsoft. Maybe for OpenAI, if they're smart, but not for Microsoft.
- dangoodmanUT 1y ago
  Or they'll just buy Cursor
- geodel 1y ago
  You win some you lose some. Google could have continued with Google code. Microsoft could've continued with their phone OS. It is difficult to know when to hold and when to fold.
- abraham 1y ago
  Gemini has some GitHub integrations https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/docs/review-github-code https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/docs/review...
- candiddevmike 1y ago
  Google Cloud has a pre-GA product called "Secure Source Manager" that looks like a fork of Gitea: https://cloud.google.com/secure-source-manager/docs/overview https://cloud.google.com/secure-source-manager/docs/overview Definitely not Google Code, but better than Cloud Source Repositories.
fvold 1y ago
The biggest change Copilot has done for me so far is to have me replace my VSCode with VSCodium to be sure it doesn't sneak any uploading of my code to a third party without my knowing. I'm all for new tech getting introduced and made useful, but let's make it all opt in, shall we?
- qwertox 1y ago
  Care to explain? Where are they uploading code to?
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    Whatever servers run Copilot for code suggestions That isn't running locally
2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
Kicking the can down the road. So we can all produce more code faster but there is NSB. Most of my time isn't spent writing the code anyway.
sudhar172 1y ago
Nice
azhenley 1y ago
Looks like their GitHub Copilot Workspace. https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-workspace https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-workspace
net01 1y ago
on a other note https://github.com/github/dmca/pull/17700 https://github.com/github/dmca/pull/17700 GitHub's automated auto-merged DMCA sync PRs get automated copilot reviews for every single one. AMAZING
- kondu 1y ago
  The worst thing about LLMs getting commoditized and becoming cheaper is seeing slop like this pollute every meaningful discussion on the internet
quantadev 1y ago
I love Copilot in VSCode. I have it set to use Claude most of the time, but it let's you pick your fav LLM, for it to use. I just open the files I'm going to refactor, type into the chat window what I want done, click 'accept' on every code change it recommends in it's answer, causing VSCode to auto-merge the changes into my code. Couldn't possibly be simpler. Then I scrutinize and test. If anything went wrong I just use GitLens to rollback the change, but that's very rare. Especially now that Copilot supports MCP I can plug in my own custom "Tools" (i.e. Function calling done by the AI Agent), and I have everything I need. Never even bothered trying Cursor or Windsurf, which i'm sure are great too, but _mainly_ since they're just forks of VSCode, as the IDE.
- SkyBelow 1y ago
  Have you tried the agent mode instead of the ask mode? With just a bit more prompting, it does a pretty good job of finding the files it needs to use on its own. Then again, I've only used it in smaller projects so larger ones might need more manual guidance.
  - quantadev 1y ago
    I assumed I was using 'Agent mode' but now that you mentioned it, I checked and you're right I've been in 'Ask mode' instead. oops. So thanks for the tip! I'm looking forward to seeing how Agent Mode is better. Copilot has been such a great experience so far I haven't tried to keep up with every little new feature they add, and I've fallen behind.
    - SkyBelow 1y ago
      I find agent mode much more powerful as it can search your code base for further reference and even has access to other systems (I haven't seen exactly what is the other level of access, I'm guessing it isn't full access to the web but it can access certain only info repositories). I do find it sometime a little over eager to do instead of explain, so Ask mode is still useful when you want explanations. It also appears that agent has the search capabilities while ask does not, but it might also be something recently added to both and I just don't recall it from being in ask mode as I'm use to the past when it wasn't present.
alvis 1y ago
God save the juniors...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
sethops1 1y ago
> Copilot coding agent is rolling out to GitHub Mobile users on iOS and Android, as well as GitHub CLI. Wait, is this going to pollute the `gh` tool? Please tell me this isn't happening.
- FergusArgyll 1y ago
  ubuntu@pc:~$ gh --help Sure! How can I help you?
- timrogers 1y ago
  Don't worry - this is 100% opt in. We've just added the ability to assign Copilot to an issue from `gh issue edit` and other similar commands. (Source: I'm on the product team for Copilot coding agent.)
hidelooktropic 1y ago
UX-wise... I kind of love the idea that all of this works in the familiar flow of raising an issue and having a magic coder swoop in and making a pull request. At the same time, I have been spoiled by Cursor. I feel I would end up preferring that the magic coder is right there with me in the IDE where I can run things and make adjustments without having to do a followup request or comment on a line.
allthenopes25 1y ago
"Drowning in technical debt?" Stop fighting and sink! But rest assured that with Github Copilot Coding Agent, your codebase will develop larger and larger volumes of new, exciting, underexplored technical debt that you can't be blamed for, and your colleagues will follow you into the murky depths soon.
bionhoward 1y ago
Major scam alert, they are training on your code in private repos if you use this You can tell because they advertise “Pro” and “Pro+” but then the FAQ reads, > Does GitHub use Copilot Business or Enterprise data to train GitHub’s model? > No. GitHub does not use either Copilot Business or Enterprise data to train its models. Aka, even paid individuals plans are getting brain raped
- manmal 1y ago
  Might have been the case, but no longer: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/managing-copilot/managing-copilot-as-an-individual-subscriber/managing-your-copilot-plan/managing-copilot-policies-as-an-individual-subscriber#model-training-and-improvements https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/managing-copilot/managing...
- dankwizard 1y ago
  If you're programming on Windows, your screen is being screenshotted every few seconds anyway. If you don't think OCR isn't analysing everything resembling a letter on your screen boy do I have some news for you.
  - malfist 1y ago
    Windows recall is not installed by default
    - dankwizard 1y ago
      Windows Recall is the local storage, user enabled AI thing. Not what I was talking about.
      - stevenhuang 1y ago
        So, pray tell, what are you talking about then?
gitroom 1y ago
[dead]
lofaszvanitt 1y ago
This is quite alarming: https://www.cursor.com/security https://www.cursor.com/security And this one too: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/privacy-policies/github-general-privacy-statement https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/privacy-policies/gith...
yobid20 1y ago
So far, i am VERY unimpressed by this. It gets everything completely wrong and tells me lies and completely false information about my code. Cursor is 100000000x better.
guestbest 1y ago
I go back and forth between ChatGPT and copilot in vs code. It really makes the grammar guessing much easier in objc. It’s not as good on libraries and none existent on 3rd party libraries, but that isn’t maybe because I challenge it enough. It makes tons of flow and grammar errors which are so easy to spot that I end up using the code most of the time after a small correction. I’m optimistic about the future especially since this is only costing me $10 a month. I have dozens of iOS apps to update. All of them are basically productivity apps that I use and sell so double plus good.
jagged-chisel 1y ago
I’ve been trying to use Copilot for a few days to get some help writing against code stored on GitHub. Copilot has been pretty useless. It couldn’t maintain context for more than two exchanges. Copilot: here’s some C code to do that Me: convert that to $OTHER_LANGUAGE Copilot: what code would you like me to convert? Me: the code you just generated Copilot: if you can upload a file or share a link to the code, I can help you translate it … It points me in a direction that’s a minimum of 15 degrees off true north (“true north” being the goal for which I am coding), usually closer to 90 degrees. When I ask for code, it hallucinates over half of the API calls.
- rcarmo 1y ago
  Be more methodical, it isn’t magic: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/05/13/2230 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/05/13/2230
  - jagged-chisel 1y ago
    I’m sure you have no idea what my method is. Besides, this whole “you’re holding it wrong” mentality isn’t productive - our technology should be adapting to us, we shouldn’t need to adapt ourselves to it. Anyway, I can just use another LLM that serves me better.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
caseysoftware 1y ago
So, fun thing.. LinkedIn doesn't use Copilot. I recently created an course for LinkedIn Learning using generative AI for creating SDKs[0]. When I was onsite with them to record it, I found my Github Copilot calls kept failing.. with a network error. Wha? Turns out that LinkedIn doesn't allow people onsite to to Copilot so I had to put my Mifi in the window and connect to that to do my work. It's wild. Btw, I love working with LinkedIn and have 15+ courses with them in the last decade. This is the only issue I've ever had.. but it was the least expected one. 0: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/build-with-ai-building-better-sdks-with-generative-ai/from-theory-to-practice-building-sdks-with-generative-ai https://www.linkedin.com/learning/build-with-ai-building-bet...
- peterson_lock 1y ago
  > LinkedIn doesn't use Copilot They definitely use it for full-time SWEs Source: I work there
Arubis 1y ago
I'm building RSOLV (https://rsolv.dev https://rsolv.dev) as an alternative approach to GitHub's Copilot agent. Our key differentiator is cross-platform support - we work with Jira, Linear, GitHub, and GitLab - rather than limiting teams to GitHub's ecosystem. GitHub's approach is technically impressive, but our experience suggests organizations derive more value from targeted automation that integrates with existing workflows rather than requiring teams to change their processes. This is particularly relevant for regulated industries where security considerations supersede feature breadth. Not everyone can just jump off of Jira on moment's notice. Curious about others' experiences with integrating AI into your platforms and tools. Has ecosystem lock-in affected your team's productivity or tool choices?
- nautilus12 1y ago
  Why don't you focus on automating your CEO's job, a comparatively easy task compared to automating engineering tasks.
  - Arubis 1y ago
    I know that's a bit kneejerk, but I actually think that's a pretty reasonable question. Automating the reputation and network of an individual person doesn't seem like a good fit for an LLM, regardless of the person. But the _decisionmaking_ capacities for a position that's largely trend-following is something that's at the very least well-supported by interacting with a well-trained model. In my mind, though, that doesn't look like a niched service that you sell to a company. That looks like a cofounder-type for someone with an idea and a technical background. If you want to build something but need help figuring out how to market and sell it, you could do a lot worse than just chatting with Claude right now and taking much of its advice. That might just by my own lack of bizdev expertise, though.
- mrmansano 1y ago
  Oh, the savings calculator in your website made me sad, that's the first time I've seen it put that way. I know it's marketing but props to you for being sincere. At least you're not hiding the intentions of your service (like others).
moi2388 1y ago
“ Copilot excels at low-to-medium complexity tasks” Then we have very different interpretations of what constitutes a medium complexity task
- rullelito 1y ago
  Medium complexity tasks in our training set*
bagol 1y ago
Lately, vscode updates are all about copilot
herbst 1y ago
It could be an amazing product. But the aggressive marketing approach from Microsoft plastering "CoPilot" everywhere makes me want to try every alternative.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Abhishek_37 1y ago
Is there anything that satisfies the people here ? Copilot today is perhaps the only AI that is actually assisting for something productive. Microsoft, besides maybe Google and OpenAI, are the only ones that are actually exploring towards the practical usefulness of AIs. Other kiddies like Sonnet and whatnot are still chasing meaningless numbers and benchmarking scores, that sort of stuff may appeal to high school kids or immatures but burning billions of dollars and energy resources just to sound like a cool kid?
tracyhenry 1y ago
I'm honestly surprised by so much hate. IMHO it's more important to look at 1) the progress we've made + what this can potentially do in 5 years and 2) how much it's already helping people write code than dismissing it based on its current state.
kookamamie 1y ago
Which GitHub subscription level is required for the agent? I found it very confusing - we have GH Business, with Copilot active. Could not find a way to upgrade our Copilot to the level required by the agent. I tried using my personal Copilot for the purpose of trialing the agent - again, a no-go, as my Copilot is "managed" by the organization I'm part of. Also, you will want to add more control over to who can assign things to Copilot Agent - just having write access to the repository is a poor descriminator, I think.
- xur17 1y ago
  I'm running into the same issue. I think you have to upgrade your entire organization to "enterprise", which comes with a per seat cost increase (separate from the cost of copilot).
  - kookamamie 1y ago
    Yes, so it seems.
bencyoung 1y ago
Some example PRs if people want to look: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115733 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115733 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115732 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115732 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115762 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115762
- acdha 1y ago
  Thanks, that’s really interesting to see - especially with the exchange around whether something is the problem or the symptom, where the confident tone belies the lack of understanding. As an open source maintainer I wonder about the best way to limit usage to cases where someone has time to spend on those interactions.
  - bencyoung 1y ago
    Seems amazing similar to the changes a junior would make (jump to the solution that "fixes" it in the most shallow way) at the moment
- bearjaws 1y ago
  That first PR is rough. Why does it have to wait for a comment to fix failing tests?
- replwoacause 1y ago
  Thanks. I wonder what model they're using under the hood? I have such a good experience working with Cline and Claude Sonnet 3.7 and a comparatively much worse time with anything Github offers. These PRs are pretty consistent with the experience I've had in the IDE too. Incidentally, what has MSFT done to Claude Sonnet 3.7 in VSCode? It's like they lobotomized it compared to using it through Cline or the API directly. Trying to save on tokens or something?
- sensanaty 1y ago
  That first PR (115733) would make me quit after a week if we were to implement this crap at my job and someone forced me to babysit an AI in its PRs in this fashion. The others are also rough. A wall of noise that tells you nothing of any substance but with an authoritative tone as if what it's doing is objective and truthful - Immediately followed by: - The 8 actual lines of code (discounting the tests & boilerplate) it wrote to actually fix the issue is being questioned by the person reviewing the code, it seems he's not convinced this is actually fixing what it should be fixing. - Not running the "comprehensive" regression tests at all - When they do run, they fail - When they get "fixed" oh-so confidently, they still fail. Fifty-nine failing checks. Some of these tests take upward of an hour to run. So the reviewer here has to read all the generated slop in the PR description and try to grok what the PR is about, read through the changes himself anyway (thankfully it's only a ~50 line diff in this situation, but imagine if this was a large refactor of some sort with a dozen files changed), and then drag it by the hand multiple times to try fix issues it itself is causing. All the while you have to tag the AI as if it's another colleague and talk to it as if it's not just going to spit out whatever inane bullshit it thinks you want to hear based on the question asked. Test failed? Well, tests fixed! (no, they weren't) And we're supposed to be excited about having this crap thrust on us, with clueless managers being sold on this being a replacement for an actual dev? We're being told this is what peak efficiency looks like?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
nicative 1y ago
How does that compare to using agent mode in VS Code? Is the main difference that the files are being edited remotely instead of on your own machine, or is there something different about the AI powering the remote agent compared to the local one?
m3kw9 1y ago
How good does your test suite and code base have to be for the agent to verify re fix properly including testing things to at can be broken else where?
accurrent 1y ago
I wonder what the coding agent story will be for bespoke hardware. For instance I'd like to test somethings out on a specific gpu which isnt available on github. Can I configure my own runners and hope for the beat? What about bespoke microcontroller?
anonzzzies 1y ago
So can I switch this to high contrast Black on White on mobile instead? I cannot read any of this (in the bright sunlight where I am) without pulling it through a reader app. People do get why books and other reading materials are not published grey on black, right?
Jackosas 1y ago
[dead]

564 points by net01 1y ago

r0ckarong 1y ago

Check in unreviewed slop straight into the codebase. Awesome.

postalrat 1y ago
Now developers can produce 20x the slop and refactor at 5x speed.
- OutOfHere 1y ago
  In my experience in VSCode, Claude 3.7 produced more unsolicited slop, whereas GPT-4.1 didn't. Claude aggressively paid attention to type compatibility. Each model would have its strengths.
- namaria 1y ago
  So a 4x slowdown?
olex 1y ago
> Once Copilot is done, it’ll tag you for review. You can ask Copilot to make changes by leaving comments in the pull request. To me, this reads like it'll be a good junior and open up a PR with its changes, letting you (the issue author) review and merge. Of course, you can just hit "merge" without looking at the changes, but then it's kinda on you when unreviewed stuff ends up in main.
- tmpz22 1y ago
  A good junior has strong communication skills, humility, asks many good questions, has imagination, and a tremendous amount of human potential.
  - th0ma5 1y ago
    Has a point of view, a clear motive, ability to think holistically about things that are hard to digitize, get mad and clean up a bunch of stuff absolutely correctly because they're finally just "sick of all of this shit", or, conservatively isolates legacy code, studying it and creating buffering wrappers for the new system in pieces as the legacy issues are mitigated with a long term strategy. Each move is discussed with their peers. etc etc etc thank you for advocating sanity!
- DeepYogurt 1y ago
  Management: "Why aren't you going faster now that the AI generates all the code and we fired half the dev team?"
odiroot 1y ago
I'm waiting for the first unicorn that uses just vibe coding.
- erikerikson 1y ago
  I expect it to be a security nightmare
  - freeone3000 1y ago
    And why would that matter?
timrogers 1y ago
Copilot pushes its work to a branch and creates a pull request, and then it's up to you to review its work, approve and merge. Copilot literally can't push directly to the default branch - we don't give it the ability to do that - precisely because we believe that all AI-generated code (just like human generated code) should be carefully reviewed before it goes to production. (Source: I'm the product lead for Copilot coding agent.)

muglug 1y ago

> Copilot excels at low-to-medium complexity tasks Oh cool! > in well-tested codebases Oh ok never mind

abraham 1y ago
Have it write tests for everything and then you've got a well tested codebase.
- eikenberry 1y ago
  You forgot the /s
- danielbln 1y ago
  Caveat empor, I've seen some LLMs mock the living hell out of everything, to the point of not testing much of anything. Something to be aware of.
  - yen223 1y ago
    I've seen too many human operators do that too. Definitely a problem to watch out for
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
throwaway12361 1y ago
In my experience it works well even without good testing, at least for greenfield projects. It just works best if there are already tests when creating updates and patches.
lukehoban 1y ago
As peer commenters have noted, coding agent can be really good at improving test coverage when needed. But also as a slightly deeper observation - agentic coding tools really do benefit significantly from good test coverage. Tests are a way to “box in” the agent and allow it to check its work regularly. While they aren’t necessary for these tools to work, they can enable coding agents to accomplish a lot more on your behalf. (I work on Copilot coding agent)

boomskats 1y ago

My buddy is at GH working on an adjacent project & he hasn't stopped talking about this for the last few days. I think I've been reminded to 'make sure I tune into the keynote on Monday' at least 8 times now. I gave up trying to watch the stream after the third authentication timeout, but if I'd known it was this I'd maybe have tried a fourth time.

tmpz22 1y ago
I’m always hesitant to listen to the line coders on projects because they’re getting a heavy dose of the internal hype every day. I’d love for this to blow past cursor. Will definitely tune in to see it.
- dontlikeyoueith 1y ago
  >I’m always hesitant to listen to the line coders on projects because they’re getting a heavy dose of the internal hype every day. I'm senior enough that I get to frequently see the gap between what my dev team thinks of our work and what actual customers think. As a result, I no longer care at all what developers (including myself on my own projects) think about the quality of the thing they've built.
  - sethammons 1y ago
    These do not need to be mutually exclusive. Define the quality of the software in terms of customer experience and give developers ownership to improve those markers. You can think service level objectives. In many cases, this means pushing for more stable deployments which requires other quality improvements.
unshavedyak 1y ago
What specific keynote are they referring to? I'm curious, but thus far my searches have failed
- babelfish 1y ago

jerpint 1y ago

These kinds of patterns allow compute to take much more time than a single chat since it is asynchronous by nature, which I think is necessary to get to working solutions on harder problems

lukehoban 1y ago
Yes. This is a really key part of why Copilot coding agent feels very different to use than Copilot agent mode in VS Code. In coding agent, we encourage the agent to be very thorough in its work, and to take time to think deeply about the problem. It builds and tests code regularly to ensure it understands the impact of changes as it makes them, and stops and thinks regularly before taking action. These choices would feel too “slow” in a synchronous IDE based experience, but feel natural in a “assign to a peer collaborator” UX. We lean into this to provide as rich of a problem solving agentic experience as possible. (I’m working on Copilot coding agent)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

Scene_Cast2 1y ago

I tried doing some vibe coding on a greenfield project (using gemini 2.5 pro + cline). On one hand - super impressive, a major productivity booster (even compared to using a non-integrated LLM chat interface). I noticed that LLMs need a very heavy hand in guiding the architecture, otherwise they'll add architectural tech debt. One easy example is that I noticed them breaking abstractions (putting things where they don't belong). Unfortunately, there's not that much self-retrospection on these aspects if you ask about the quality of the code or if there are any better ways of doing it. Of course, if you pick up that something is in the wrong spot and prompt better, they'll pick up on it immediately. I also ended up blowing through $15 of LLM tokens in a single evening. (Previously, as a heavy LLM user including coding tasks, I was averaging maybe $20 a month.)

falcor84 1y ago
> LLMs need a very heavy hand in guiding the architecture, otherwise they'll add architectural tech debt I wonder if the next phase would be the rise of (AI-driven?) "linters" that check that the implementation matches the architecture definition.
- dontlikeyoueith 1y ago
  And now we've come full circle back to UML-based code generation. Everything old is new again!
candiddevmike 1y ago
> I also ended up blowing through $15 of LLM tokens in a single evening. This is a feature, not a bug. LLMs are going to be the next "OMG my AWS bill" phenomenon.
- Scene_Cast2 1y ago
  Cline very visibly displays the ongoing cost of the task. Light edits are about 10 cents, and heavy stuff can run a couple of bucks. It's just that the tab accumulates faster than I expect.

OutOfHere 1y ago

GitHub had this exact feature late last year itself, perhaps under a slightly different name.

throwup238 1y ago
Are you thinking if Copilot Workspaces? That seemed to drop off the Github changelog after February. I’m wondering if that team got reallocated to the copilot agent.
- WorldMaker 1y ago
  Probably. Also this new feature seems like an expansion/refinement of Copilot Workspaces to better fit the classic Github UX: "assign an issue to Copilot to get a PR" sounds exactly like the workflow Copilot Workspaces wanted to have when it grew up.
timrogers 1y ago
I think you're probably thinking of Copilot Workspace (<https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilot-workspace/ https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilo...>). Copilot Workspace could take a task, implement it and create a PR - but it had a linear, highly structured flow, and wasn't deeply integrated into the GitHub tools that developers already use like issues and PRs. With Copilot coding agent, we're taking all of the great work on Copilot Workspace, and all the learnings and feedback from that project, and integrating it more deeply into GitHub and really leveraging the capabilities of 2025's models, which allow the agent to be more fluid, asynchronous and autonomous. (Source: I'm the product lead for Copilot coding agent.)

taurath 1y ago

> Copilot excels at low-to-medium complexity tasks in well-tested codebases, from adding features and fixing bugs to extending tests, refactoring, and improving documentation. Bounds bounds bounds bounds. The important part for humans seems to be maintaining boundaries for AI. If your well-tested codebase has the tests built thru AI, its probably not going to work. I think its somewhat telling that they can't share numbers for how they're using it internally. I want to know that Microsoft, the company famous for dog-fooding is using this day in and day out, with success. There's real stuff in there, and my brain has an insanely hard time separating the trillion dollars of hype from the usefulness.

twodave 1y ago
I feel like I saw a quote recently that said 20-30% of MS code is generated in some way. [0] In any case, I think this is the best use case for AI in programming—as a force multiplier for the developer. It’s for the best benefit of both AI and humanity for AI to avoid diminishing the creativity, agency and critical thinking skills of its human operators. AI should be task oriented, but high level decision-making and planning should always be a human task. So I think our use of AI for programming should remain heavily human-driven for the long term. Ultimately, its use should involve enriching humans’ capabilities over churning out features for profit, though there are obvious limits to that. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-as-30percent-of-microsoft-code-is-written-by-ai.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...
- tmpz22 1y ago
  How much of that is protobuf stubs and other forms of banal autogenerate code?
  - twodave 1y ago
    Updated my comment to include the link. As much as 30% specifically generated by AI.
    - 1y ago

softwaredoug 1y ago

Is Copilot a classic case of slow megacorp gets outflanked by more creative and unhindered newcomers (ie Cursor)? It seems Copilot could have really owned the vibe coding space. But that didn’t happen. I wonder why? Lots of ideas gummed up in organizational inefficiencies, etc?

ilaksh 1y ago
This is a direct threat to Cursor. The smarter the models get, the less often programmers really need to dig into an IDE, even one with AI in it. Give it a couple of years and there will be a lot of projects that were done just by assigning tasks where no one even opened Cursor or anything.

theusus 1y ago

I have been so far disappointed by copilot's offerings. It's just not good enough for anything valuable. I don't want you to write my getter and setter. And call it a day.

rvz 1y ago
I think we expected disappointment with this one. (I expected it at least)[0] But the upgraded Copilot was just in response to Cursor and Winsurf. We'll see. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43904611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43904611

asadm 1y ago

In the early days on LLM, I had developed an "agent" using github actions + issues workflow[1], similar to how this works. It was very limited but kinda worked ie. you assign it a bug and it fired an action, did some architect/editing tasks, validated changes and finally sent a PR. Good to see an official way of doing this. 1. https://github.com/asadm/chota https://github.com/asadm/chota

nodja 1y ago

I wish they optimized things before adding more crap that will slow things down even more. The only thing that's fast with copilot is the autocomplete, it sometimes takes several minutes to make edits on a 100 line file regardless of the model I pick (some are faster than others). If these models had a close to 100% hit rate this would be somewhat fine, but going back and forth with something that takes this long is not productive. It's literally faster to open claude/chatgpt on a new tab and paste the question and code there and paste it back into vscode than using their ask/edit/agent tools. I've cancelled my copilot subscription last week and when it expires in two weeks I'll mostly likely shift to local models for autocomplete/simple stuff.

brushfoot 1y ago
My experience has mostly been the opposite -- changes to several-hundred-line files usually only take a few seconds. That said, months ago I did experience the kind of slow agent edit times you mentioned. I don't know where the bottleneck was, but it hasn't come back. I'm on library WiFi right now, "vibe coding" (as much as I dislike that term) a new tool for my customers using Copilot, and it's snappy.
- nodja 1y ago
  Here's a video of what it looks like with sonnet 3.7. https://streamable.com/rqlr84 https://streamable.com/rqlr84 The claude and gemini models tend to be the slowest (yes, including flash). 4o is currently the fastest but still not great.
  - NicuCalcea 1y ago
    For me, the speed varies from day to day (Sonnet 3.7), but I've never seen it this slow.
BeetleB 1y ago
Several minutes? Something is seriously wrong. For most models, it takes seconds.

joelthelion 1y ago

I don't know, I feel this is the wrong level to place the AI at this moment. Chat-based AI programming (such as Aider) offers more control, while being almost as convenient.

sync 1y ago

Anthropic just announced the same thing for Claude Code, same day: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/github-actions https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/github-action...

Yenrabbit 1y ago
And Google's version: https://jules.google https://jules.google

OutOfHere 1y ago

Which model does it use? Will this let me select which model to use? I have seen a big difference in the type of code that different models produce, although their prompts may be to blame/credit in part.

qwertox 1y ago
I assume you can select whichever one you want (GPT-4o, o3-mini, Claude 3.5, 3.7, 3.7 thinking, Gemini 2.0 Flash, GPT=4.1 and the previews o1, Gemini 2.5 Pro and 04-mini), subject to the pricing multiplicators they announced recently [0]. Edit: From the TFA: Using the agent consumes GitHub Actions minutes and Copilot premium requests, starting from entitlements included with your plan. [0] https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/managing-copilot/monitoring-usage-and-entitlements/about-premium-requests https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/managing-copilot/monitori...
timrogers 1y ago
At the moment, we're using Claude 3.7 Sonnet - but we're keeping our options open to experiment with other models and potentially bring in a model picker. (Source: I'm on the product team for Copilot coding agent.)
- OutOfHere 1y ago
  Do you at least control the prompt? In my experience using Claude Sonnet 3.7 in GitHub Copilot extension in VSCode, the model produced hideously verbose code, completely unnecessary stuff. GPT-4.1 was a breath of fresh air.
- ravedave5 1y ago
  I was trying to find information on this on the internet and couldn't find any, thanks for providing. Interestingly enough Copilot coding agent on github.com repeatedly could not complete css changes correctly, when I switched to Agent mode in the project IDE with Claude 3.7 it was able to complete it in one round, so I assumed that there was a different model.

shwouchk 1y ago

I played around with it quite a bit. it is both impressive and scary. most importantly, it tends to indiscriminately use dependencies from random tiny repos, and often enough not the correct ones, for major projects. buyer beware.

yellow_lead 1y ago
Given that PRs run actions in a more trusted context for private repos, this is a bit concerning.
- timrogers 1y ago
  As we've built Copilot coding agent, we've put a lot of thought and work into our security story. One of the things we've done here is to treat Copilot's commits like commits from a first-time contributor to an open source project. When Copilot pushes changes, your GitHub Actions workflows won't run by default, and you'll have to click the "Approve and run workflows" button in the merge box. That gives you the chance to run Copilot's code before it runs in Actions and has access to your secrets. (Source: I'm on the product team for Copilot coding agent.)
  - yellow_lead 1y ago
    Nice! Thanks for that info
  - ThierryAbalea 1y ago
    The announcement https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilot-meet-the-new-coding-agent/ https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilo... seems to position GitHub Actions as a core part of the Copilot coding agent’s architecture. From what I understand in the documentation and your comment, GitHub Actions is triggered later in the flow, mainly for security reasons. Just to clarify, is GitHub Actions also used in the development environment of the agent, or only after the code is generated and pushed?
PhilipRoman 1y ago

qwertox 1y ago

In hindsight it was a mistake that Google killed Google Code. Then again, I guess they wouldn't have put enough effort into it to develop into a real GitHub alternative. Now Microsoft sits on a goldmine of source code and has the ability to offer AI integration even to private repositories. I can upload my code into a private repo and discuss it with an AI. The only thing Google can counter with would be to build tools which developers install locally, but even then I guess that the integration would be limited. And considering that Microsoft owns the "coding OS" VS Code, it makes Google look even worse. Let's see what they come up with tomorrow at Google I/O, but I doubt that it will be a serious competition for Microsoft. Maybe for OpenAI, if they're smart, but not for Microsoft.

dangoodmanUT 1y ago
Or they'll just buy Cursor
geodel 1y ago
You win some you lose some. Google could have continued with Google code. Microsoft could've continued with their phone OS. It is difficult to know when to hold and when to fold.
abraham 1y ago
Gemini has some GitHub integrations https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/docs/review-github-code https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/docs/review...
candiddevmike 1y ago
Google Cloud has a pre-GA product called "Secure Source Manager" that looks like a fork of Gitea: https://cloud.google.com/secure-source-manager/docs/overview https://cloud.google.com/secure-source-manager/docs/overview Definitely not Google Code, but better than Cloud Source Repositories.

fvold 1y ago

The biggest change Copilot has done for me so far is to have me replace my VSCode with VSCodium to be sure it doesn't sneak any uploading of my code to a third party without my knowing. I'm all for new tech getting introduced and made useful, but let's make it all opt in, shall we?

qwertox 1y ago
Care to explain? Where are they uploading code to?
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  Whatever servers run Copilot for code suggestions That isn't running locally

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago

Kicking the can down the road. So we can all produce more code faster but there is NSB. Most of my time isn't spent writing the code anyway.

sudhar172 1y ago

Nice

azhenley 1y ago

Looks like their GitHub Copilot Workspace. https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-workspace https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-workspace

net01 1y ago

on a other note https://github.com/github/dmca/pull/17700 https://github.com/github/dmca/pull/17700 GitHub's automated auto-merged DMCA sync PRs get automated copilot reviews for every single one. AMAZING

kondu 1y ago
The worst thing about LLMs getting commoditized and becoming cheaper is seeing slop like this pollute every meaningful discussion on the internet

quantadev 1y ago

I love Copilot in VSCode. I have it set to use Claude most of the time, but it let's you pick your fav LLM, for it to use. I just open the files I'm going to refactor, type into the chat window what I want done, click 'accept' on every code change it recommends in it's answer, causing VSCode to auto-merge the changes into my code. Couldn't possibly be simpler. Then I scrutinize and test. If anything went wrong I just use GitLens to rollback the change, but that's very rare. Especially now that Copilot supports MCP I can plug in my own custom "Tools" (i.e. Function calling done by the AI Agent), and I have everything I need. Never even bothered trying Cursor or Windsurf, which i'm sure are great too, but _mainly_ since they're just forks of VSCode, as the IDE.

SkyBelow 1y ago
Have you tried the agent mode instead of the ask mode? With just a bit more prompting, it does a pretty good job of finding the files it needs to use on its own. Then again, I've only used it in smaller projects so larger ones might need more manual guidance.
- quantadev 1y ago
  I assumed I was using 'Agent mode' but now that you mentioned it, I checked and you're right I've been in 'Ask mode' instead. oops. So thanks for the tip! I'm looking forward to seeing how Agent Mode is better. Copilot has been such a great experience so far I haven't tried to keep up with every little new feature they add, and I've fallen behind.
  - SkyBelow 1y ago
    I find agent mode much more powerful as it can search your code base for further reference and even has access to other systems (I haven't seen exactly what is the other level of access, I'm guessing it isn't full access to the web but it can access certain only info repositories). I do find it sometime a little over eager to do instead of explain, so Ask mode is still useful when you want explanations. It also appears that agent has the search capabilities while ask does not, but it might also be something recently added to both and I just don't recall it from being in ask mode as I'm use to the past when it wasn't present.

alvis 1y ago

God save the juniors...

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

sethops1 1y ago

> Copilot coding agent is rolling out to GitHub Mobile users on iOS and Android, as well as GitHub CLI. Wait, is this going to pollute the `gh` tool? Please tell me this isn't happening.

FergusArgyll 1y ago
ubuntu@pc:~$ gh --help Sure! How can I help you?
timrogers 1y ago
Don't worry - this is 100% opt in. We've just added the ability to assign Copilot to an issue from `gh issue edit` and other similar commands. (Source: I'm on the product team for Copilot coding agent.)

hidelooktropic 1y ago

UX-wise... I kind of love the idea that all of this works in the familiar flow of raising an issue and having a magic coder swoop in and making a pull request. At the same time, I have been spoiled by Cursor. I feel I would end up preferring that the magic coder is right there with me in the IDE where I can run things and make adjustments without having to do a followup request or comment on a line.

allthenopes25 1y ago

"Drowning in technical debt?" Stop fighting and sink! But rest assured that with Github Copilot Coding Agent, your codebase will develop larger and larger volumes of new, exciting, underexplored technical debt that you can't be blamed for, and your colleagues will follow you into the murky depths soon.

bionhoward 1y ago

Major scam alert, they are training on your code in private repos if you use this You can tell because they advertise “Pro” and “Pro+” but then the FAQ reads, > Does GitHub use Copilot Business or Enterprise data to train GitHub’s model? > No. GitHub does not use either Copilot Business or Enterprise data to train its models. Aka, even paid individuals plans are getting brain raped

manmal 1y ago
Might have been the case, but no longer: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/managing-copilot/managing-copilot-as-an-individual-subscriber/managing-your-copilot-plan/managing-copilot-policies-as-an-individual-subscriber#model-training-and-improvements https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/managing-copilot/managing...
dankwizard 1y ago
If you're programming on Windows, your screen is being screenshotted every few seconds anyway. If you don't think OCR isn't analysing everything resembling a letter on your screen boy do I have some news for you.
- malfist 1y ago
  Windows recall is not installed by default
  - dankwizard 1y ago
    Windows Recall is the local storage, user enabled AI thing. Not what I was talking about.
    - stevenhuang 1y ago
      So, pray tell, what are you talking about then?

gitroom 1y ago

[dead]

lofaszvanitt 1y ago

This is quite alarming: https://www.cursor.com/security https://www.cursor.com/security And this one too: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/privacy-policies/github-general-privacy-statement https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/privacy-policies/gith...

yobid20 1y ago

So far, i am VERY unimpressed by this. It gets everything completely wrong and tells me lies and completely false information about my code. Cursor is 100000000x better.

guestbest 1y ago

I go back and forth between ChatGPT and copilot in vs code. It really makes the grammar guessing much easier in objc. It’s not as good on libraries and none existent on 3rd party libraries, but that isn’t maybe because I challenge it enough. It makes tons of flow and grammar errors which are so easy to spot that I end up using the code most of the time after a small correction. I’m optimistic about the future especially since this is only costing me $10 a month. I have dozens of iOS apps to update. All of them are basically productivity apps that I use and sell so double plus good.

jagged-chisel 1y ago

I’ve been trying to use Copilot for a few days to get some help writing against code stored on GitHub. Copilot has been pretty useless. It couldn’t maintain context for more than two exchanges. Copilot: here’s some C code to do that Me: convert that to $OTHER_LANGUAGE Copilot: what code would you like me to convert? Me: the code you just generated Copilot: if you can upload a file or share a link to the code, I can help you translate it … It points me in a direction that’s a minimum of 15 degrees off true north (“true north” being the goal for which I am coding), usually closer to 90 degrees. When I ask for code, it hallucinates over half of the API calls.

rcarmo 1y ago
Be more methodical, it isn’t magic: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/05/13/2230 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/05/13/2230
- jagged-chisel 1y ago
  I’m sure you have no idea what my method is. Besides, this whole “you’re holding it wrong” mentality isn’t productive - our technology should be adapting to us, we shouldn’t need to adapt ourselves to it. Anyway, I can just use another LLM that serves me better.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

caseysoftware 1y ago

So, fun thing.. LinkedIn doesn't use Copilot. I recently created an course for LinkedIn Learning using generative AI for creating SDKs[0]. When I was onsite with them to record it, I found my Github Copilot calls kept failing.. with a network error. Wha? Turns out that LinkedIn doesn't allow people onsite to to Copilot so I had to put my Mifi in the window and connect to that to do my work. It's wild. Btw, I love working with LinkedIn and have 15+ courses with them in the last decade. This is the only issue I've ever had.. but it was the least expected one. 0: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/build-with-ai-building-better-sdks-with-generative-ai/from-theory-to-practice-building-sdks-with-generative-ai https://www.linkedin.com/learning/build-with-ai-building-bet...

peterson_lock 1y ago
> LinkedIn doesn't use Copilot They definitely use it for full-time SWEs Source: I work there

Arubis 1y ago

I'm building RSOLV (https://rsolv.dev https://rsolv.dev) as an alternative approach to GitHub's Copilot agent. Our key differentiator is cross-platform support - we work with Jira, Linear, GitHub, and GitLab - rather than limiting teams to GitHub's ecosystem. GitHub's approach is technically impressive, but our experience suggests organizations derive more value from targeted automation that integrates with existing workflows rather than requiring teams to change their processes. This is particularly relevant for regulated industries where security considerations supersede feature breadth. Not everyone can just jump off of Jira on moment's notice. Curious about others' experiences with integrating AI into your platforms and tools. Has ecosystem lock-in affected your team's productivity or tool choices?

nautilus12 1y ago
Why don't you focus on automating your CEO's job, a comparatively easy task compared to automating engineering tasks.
- Arubis 1y ago
  I know that's a bit kneejerk, but I actually think that's a pretty reasonable question. Automating the reputation and network of an individual person doesn't seem like a good fit for an LLM, regardless of the person. But the _decisionmaking_ capacities for a position that's largely trend-following is something that's at the very least well-supported by interacting with a well-trained model. In my mind, though, that doesn't look like a niched service that you sell to a company. That looks like a cofounder-type for someone with an idea and a technical background. If you want to build something but need help figuring out how to market and sell it, you could do a lot worse than just chatting with Claude right now and taking much of its advice. That might just by my own lack of bizdev expertise, though.
mrmansano 1y ago
Oh, the savings calculator in your website made me sad, that's the first time I've seen it put that way. I know it's marketing but props to you for being sincere. At least you're not hiding the intentions of your service (like others).

moi2388 1y ago

“ Copilot excels at low-to-medium complexity tasks” Then we have very different interpretations of what constitutes a medium complexity task

rullelito 1y ago
Medium complexity tasks in our training set*

bagol 1y ago

Lately, vscode updates are all about copilot

herbst 1y ago

It could be an amazing product. But the aggressive marketing approach from Microsoft plastering "CoPilot" everywhere makes me want to try every alternative.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Abhishek_37 1y ago

Is there anything that satisfies the people here ? Copilot today is perhaps the only AI that is actually assisting for something productive. Microsoft, besides maybe Google and OpenAI, are the only ones that are actually exploring towards the practical usefulness of AIs. Other kiddies like Sonnet and whatnot are still chasing meaningless numbers and benchmarking scores, that sort of stuff may appeal to high school kids or immatures but burning billions of dollars and energy resources just to sound like a cool kid?

tracyhenry 1y ago

I'm honestly surprised by so much hate. IMHO it's more important to look at 1) the progress we've made + what this can potentially do in 5 years and 2) how much it's already helping people write code than dismissing it based on its current state.

kookamamie 1y ago

Which GitHub subscription level is required for the agent? I found it very confusing - we have GH Business, with Copilot active. Could not find a way to upgrade our Copilot to the level required by the agent. I tried using my personal Copilot for the purpose of trialing the agent - again, a no-go, as my Copilot is "managed" by the organization I'm part of. Also, you will want to add more control over to who can assign things to Copilot Agent - just having write access to the repository is a poor descriminator, I think.

xur17 1y ago
I'm running into the same issue. I think you have to upgrade your entire organization to "enterprise", which comes with a per seat cost increase (separate from the cost of copilot).
- kookamamie 1y ago
  Yes, so it seems.

bencyoung 1y ago

Some example PRs if people want to look: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115733 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115733 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115732 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115732 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115762 https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115762

acdha 1y ago
Thanks, that’s really interesting to see - especially with the exchange around whether something is the problem or the symptom, where the confident tone belies the lack of understanding. As an open source maintainer I wonder about the best way to limit usage to cases where someone has time to spend on those interactions.
- bencyoung 1y ago
  Seems amazing similar to the changes a junior would make (jump to the solution that "fixes" it in the most shallow way) at the moment
bearjaws 1y ago
That first PR is rough. Why does it have to wait for a comment to fix failing tests?
replwoacause 1y ago
Thanks. I wonder what model they're using under the hood? I have such a good experience working with Cline and Claude Sonnet 3.7 and a comparatively much worse time with anything Github offers. These PRs are pretty consistent with the experience I've had in the IDE too. Incidentally, what has MSFT done to Claude Sonnet 3.7 in VSCode? It's like they lobotomized it compared to using it through Cline or the API directly. Trying to save on tokens or something?
sensanaty 1y ago
That first PR (115733) would make me quit after a week if we were to implement this crap at my job and someone forced me to babysit an AI in its PRs in this fashion. The others are also rough. A wall of noise that tells you nothing of any substance but with an authoritative tone as if what it's doing is objective and truthful - Immediately followed by: - The 8 actual lines of code (discounting the tests & boilerplate) it wrote to actually fix the issue is being questioned by the person reviewing the code, it seems he's not convinced this is actually fixing what it should be fixing. - Not running the "comprehensive" regression tests at all - When they do run, they fail - When they get "fixed" oh-so confidently, they still fail. Fifty-nine failing checks. Some of these tests take upward of an hour to run. So the reviewer here has to read all the generated slop in the PR description and try to grok what the PR is about, read through the changes himself anyway (thankfully it's only a ~50 line diff in this situation, but imagine if this was a large refactor of some sort with a dozen files changed), and then drag it by the hand multiple times to try fix issues it itself is causing. All the while you have to tag the AI as if it's another colleague and talk to it as if it's not just going to spit out whatever inane bullshit it thinks you want to hear based on the question asked. Test failed? Well, tests fixed! (no, they weren't) And we're supposed to be excited about having this crap thrust on us, with clueless managers being sold on this being a replacement for an actual dev? We're being told this is what peak efficiency looks like?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

nicative 1y ago

How does that compare to using agent mode in VS Code? Is the main difference that the files are being edited remotely instead of on your own machine, or is there something different about the AI powering the remote agent compared to the local one?

m3kw9 1y ago

How good does your test suite and code base have to be for the agent to verify re fix properly including testing things to at can be broken else where?

accurrent 1y ago

I wonder what the coding agent story will be for bespoke hardware. For instance I'd like to test somethings out on a specific gpu which isnt available on github. Can I configure my own runners and hope for the beat? What about bespoke microcontroller?

anonzzzies 1y ago

So can I switch this to high contrast Black on White on mobile instead? I cannot read any of this (in the bright sunlight where I am) without pulling it through a reader app. People do get why books and other reading materials are not published grey on black, right?

Jackosas 1y ago

[dead]