GitHub has unveiled the launch of a new coding agent as part of a sweeping update to its Copilot service.
Unveiled at Microsoft Build 2025, the new agent is designed specifically to tackle “low-to-medium complexity tasks”, the company said. The agent will be capable of adding features, fixing bugs, refactoring code, or improving documentation.
The agent operates in a temporary and customizable development environment, powered by GitHub Actions, and is designed to work in tandem with developers autonomously, rather than as an AI ‘assistant’.
In a blog post unveiling the new coding agent, CEO Thomas Dohmke explained the tool is embedded directly within GitHub and can be activated by assigning a GitHub issue to Copilot.
“The agent spins up a secure and fully customizable development environment powered by GitHub Actions,” he said. “As the agent works, it pushes commits to a draft pull request, and you can track it every step of the way through the agent session logs”.
What this means is that developers will be able to track and monitor the progress of the agent in any given task, providing complete observability and transparency throughout the process.
Similarly, all pull requests require human approval before CI/CD workflows are run, Dohmke noted, creating an “extra protection control for the build and deployment environment”.
“With the new coding agent, Copilot lives where developers collaborate with each other: right within GitHub,” Dohmke wrote.
“You can hand off the time consuming but boring tasks to Copilot, who will use pull requests, CI/CD, and all of your existing tooling while you focus on the interesting work.”
How GitHub’s new coding agent works
Want to get started with the new coding agent? You can use it now, according to GitHub, with the tool available immediately for all Copilot Enterprise and Copilot Pro+ users.
Getting started is also relatively simple, according to Dohmke. Users will be required to assign one or more GitHub issues to Copilot, which can be done through Github.com, on GitHub Mobile, or through the GitHub CLI.
“You can also ask Copilot to open a pull request from Copilot Chat like this: > Open a pull request to refactor this query generator into its own class Once an issue is assigned to it, the agent adds an 👀 emoji reaction and starts its work in the background.”
From here on, the agent uses GitHub Actions to boot a virtual machine, clones the selected repository, configures the environment and analyzes the codebase with retrieval augmented generation (RAG).
(Image credit: GitHub)
“As the agent works, it regularly pushes its changes to a draft pull request as git commits and updates the pull request’s description,” Dohmke added.
Throughout the process, users will be able to see the agent’s reasoning and validation steps in real-time via session logs. This, the company said, will make it “easy to trace decisions and spot issues”.
Once a task is complete, users will be notified and given the chance to review. This will also allow devs to leave comments asking to make changes, which will be picked up automatically and propose potential code changes.
“The agent also incorporates context from related issue or PR discussions and follows any custom repository instructions, allowing it to understand both the intent behind the task and the coding standards of the project,” Dohmke noted.
More agents for coding
The announcement from GitHub marks the latest in a string of AI-related updates to the platform.
The use of the technology in software development has become a leading use-case for big tech providers, with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and others all launching AI coding tools over the last two years.
With agentic AI now the latest industry trend, it’s unsurprising to see GitHub jumping on the bandwagon in this regard. Indeed, just last week OpenAI unveiled its own coding agent, dubbed ‘Codex’.
Again, this agentic AI coding tool is designed to operate autonomously in tandem with the user, rather than an AI assistant which requires a higher degree of manual toil and tinkering for developers.
GitHub has been keen to highlight the benefits of AI for developers and engineers, with research from the firm last year showing the technology has delivered marked improvements to productivity and efficiency.
