Build 2026: Microsoft Announces GitHub Copilot App
- Paul Thurrott
- Jun 02, 2026
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The GitHub Copilot desktop app is like a central dashboard for managing AI agents and interacting with GitHub. It’s available in technical preview for Windows 11, Windows 11 on Arm, Mac, and Linux, but it currently requires a GitHub Copilot subscription. It will ship to Copilot Free users in the future, and there’s a waitlist for those interested.
“The new GitHub Copilot app is the agent-native desktop experience built on GitHub,” GitHub’s Mario Rodriguez explains. “From a single My Work view, you can see work in motion across connected repositories: Active sessions, issues, pull requests, and background automations.”
Every session you start in the GitHub Copilot app runs in its own Git worktree so that it’s isolated and parallel agents can work without getting in each other’s way. You can start with a prompt or an issue in your inbox and the app will get the context it needs from the issues, pull requests, and repos you connected. There’s an Agent Merge for carrying pull requests through reviews, checks, and merging. And a Canvas you can use as a bidirectional surface for human and agent interactions; among other things, you can use them to inspect, steer, and verify the work agents are doing on your behalf.
The GitHub Copilot app supports cloud and local sandboxing, code reviews, both with policy support. And you can build your own tools with the GitHub Copilot SDK, now generally available in Node.js/TypeScript, Python, Go, .NET, Rust, and Java. Related to this, Microsoft also redesigned the Copilot CLI to support a voice mode and an experimental mode with tabbed access to pull requests, issues, and gists from the terminal.
“The GitHub Copilot app, sandboxes, code review, automation, context, and partner ecosystem are coming together as one system: agents can do more of the work, while developers keep control of quality, policy, and delivery,” Rodriguez adds. “GitHub is where that system lives, because it is already where the code, the reviews, the issues, and the teams are.”