GitHub introduces Copilot AI agent

GitHub has embedded an asynchronous coding agent for GitHub Copilot that is capable of testing, iterating and refining code. The AI agent is accessible from Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code, and can spin up a secure and customisable development environment and produce draft pull requests for human approval.

To maintain security, human oversight is required before any continuous innovation and development workflows are run, and existing policies such as branch protections and controlled internet access still apply to the coding environment generated by the tool.

According to GitHub, the agent has been developed to complete low- to medium-complexity tasks such as adding features, fixing bugs, refactoring code and improving documentation.

The coding agent is available in preview to all Copilot Enterprise and Copilot Pro+ users. It is already in use by organisations such as Commonwealth Bank and Carvana.

Using the agent consumes Copilot premium requests from a user’s entitlements, included in their Copilot subscription, plus GitHub Actions minutes, which have an included allowance for each customer.

GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said GitHub is quickly becoming the place where developers collaborate with agents in a configurable way to produce code.

“It’s vital that organisations and developers are ready to embrace these agents without compromising their security posture,” he said. “Built around an integrated, secure and fully customisable development environment powered by GitHub Actions, the Copilot coding agent is the most enterprise-ready of its kind — amplifying human developers with trust by design. And these protections aren’t just for us: as the new home of AI agents, we’re making the same primitives available to partners to ensure an open ecosystem for agentic peer programming.”

To further support demand for AI capabilities, GitHub has announced it will begin open sourcing the GitHub Copilot Chat extension under the open source MIT licence, which will be followed by a gradual integration of key AI capabilities directly into VS Code core.

GitHub has likewise extended the functionality of GitHub Models and added support for xAI’s Grok 3 in the platform.

Image credit: iStock.com/Jacob Wackerhausen