Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More
Microsoft’s hit AI programming tool GitHub Copilot wants to move away from simply helping people complete code and as of today, will allow for users to set up asynchronous code testing.
The move brings GitHub Copilot to work more autonomously for developers, keeping the app competitive as the AI coding assistant space has become more crowded with AI-powered tools, including Microsoft investment OpenAI’s rival Codex software engineering agent released Friday.
GitHub Copilot Agent, first announced as Project Padawan back in February, will check, test and iterate code. When invoked, Copilot Agent can navigate the repo, edit files, run commands and open pull requests.
Mario Rodriguez, chief product officer at GitHub, told VentureBeat that GitHub Copilot Agent could open developers up to focus on other tasks while ensuring any previous code they wrote works.
“I could go into an issue, and before, I needed to go back into my IDE, clone that repo, open the issue to try and figure it out, et cetera, et cetera,” Rodriguez said. “Now I can just assign it to Copilot and it’s right there along with my other peers.”
He added that the Copilot Agent embeds into GitHub and follows the user’s style, and that the human developer can monitor it because the agent logs its reasoning and validation steps.
A developer can assign the issue to the agent as much as they would for human coworkers. The agent will then respond with the eyes emoji to indicate it will begin resolving the problem. The agent taps GitHub Actions to boot up a virtual machine, then clones the repository. It decides its workflow, analyzes the codebase using GitHub’s RAG code search, and continuously updates the pull request. Once it’s done, the agent will tag the user for review.
The agent considers context from previous pull request discussions and follows any custom repo instructions.
Changing coding space
GitHub was one of the first to launch coding assistants to help developers start to generate code faster. Over time, more and more coding assistants have come out, and code generation and review have become an expected service of AI platforms.
GitHub Copilot now has to compete not only with ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude’s coding abilities but also with Google’s Code Assist and OpenAI’s Codex.
But as AI-generated code becomes more accepted, especially with the growth of vibe coding, coding services like GitHub Copilot have to evolve beyond completing code. Making Copilot more agentic makes coding help more autonomous, going away from the human prompting Copilot at most steps to letting it do its own work. At the same time, the developer focuses on something else.
“So before you had code completion, which you always have be there, and your productivity is not going to increase as much because you are pressing every single keystroke being made,” Rodriguez said. “It’s an agentic experience; it’s completely asynchronous to you. You could be doing one task, and Copilot could be executing on five others, and that’s really the value at the end.”
Rodriguez said this opens up more asynchronous capabilities for GitHub.
MCP support to keep code working
Something else that’s new for GitHub is support for MCP, so the Copilot Agent can communicate and get additional data for any projects it is reviewing.
MCP or Model Context Protocol, the fast-rising agentic interoperability platform from Anthropic, standardizes more than agentic communication, but offers data transfer interoperability as well.
If the agent realizes the issue is missing important context or data, for example, a broken photo in the code, the agent can invoke the MCP server to retrieve the information from the data source’s MCP server.
Rodriguez said that GitHub Copilot Agent, like its previous name Padawan, learns and assists developers to free them up to work on their ideas without focusing so much on maintaining code.
“If you believe that software powers everything in the world right now, that the next big invention is gonna be powered by software, then what you want to be doing is giving these developers the best tools on the planet. Copilot can work on the other projects, and then I could work on the one that is the creativity that needs me as a human, as a creative,” he said.
