GitHub Copilot is Getting Agentic

GitHub Copilot may be the single most useful AI companion I’ve used, but it’s about to get a lot better. GitHub today announced that it is bringing agentic capabilities to the product, along with other improvements.

“Today, we are upgrading GitHub Copilot with the force of even more agentic AI [with] agent mode and the general availability of Copilot Edits, both in Visual Studio Code,” GitHub’s Thomas Dohmke writes. “We are adding Gemini 2.0 Flash to the model picker for all Copilot users. And we [are providing] a first look at Copilot’s new autonomous agent, code-named Project Padawan. From code completions, chat, and multi-file edits to workspace and agents, Copilot puts the human at the center of the creative work that is software development. AI helps with the things you don’t want to do, so you have more time for the things you do.”

Here’s what’s new.

Agent mode (preview). GitHub Copilot’s agent mode can iterate on its own code and the results of that code, finding errors, and fixing them automatically. It can suggest terminal commands and ask you to execute them, analyze run-time errors with self-healing capabilities, and infer additional tasks you did not specify. To access this feature in preview, you have to install Visual Studio Code Insiders and enable the experimental Agent mode setting. Then, an Edit to Agent option will appear next to the model picker. Agent mode will come to other IDEs soon, GitHub says.

Copilot Edits. This new feature lets you specify a set of files and then use natural language to ask GitHub Copilot what you need. It helps you make inline changes in your workspace, across multiple files. And then you can review the suggested changes, accepting the ones you want, and iterating with follow-up requests. It works with OpenAI GPT-4o, o1, and o3-mini; Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and now, Google Gemini 2.0 Flash (see below). Copilot Edits is generally available in Visual Studio Code, but it’s also available now in preview in Visual Studio 2022.

Project Padawan. GitHub is working on an autonomous software engineering (SWE) agent codenamed Project Padawan that it says will ship later this year. “It will allow you to directly assign issues to GitHub Copilot, using any of the GitHub clients, and have it produce fully tested pull requests,” Dohmke says. “Once a task is finished, Copilot will assign human reviewers to the PR, and work to resolve feedback they add. In a sense, it will be like onboarding Copilot as a contributor to every repository on GitHub … We believe the end-state of Project Padawan will result in transforming how teams manage critical-yet-mundane tasks, such as fixing bugs or creating and maintaining automated tests.”

Google Gemini 2.0 Flash. Microsoft has added the Gemini 2.0 Flash model to the model picker for all Copilot users.