DEVOPSdigest

GitHub announced that GitHub Copilot now includes an asynchronous coding agent, embedded directly in GitHub and accessible from VS Code—creating a powerful Agentic DevOps loop across coding environments.

Anchored on its core principle of developer choice and access, GitHub is also open sourcing Copilot Chat in VS Code, enhancing its platform with new functionality in GitHub Models—including support for Grok 3 from xAI—and bringing agent mode to JetBrains, Eclipse, and Xcode.

“GitHub is where the world's developers work on their projects. Now, it’s becoming the place where they collaborate with agents in a configurable, steerable, and verifiable way. It’s vital that organizations and developers are ready to embrace these agents without compromising their security posture,” said GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. “Built around an integrated, secure, and fully customizable 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.”
Integrated, secure, and fully customizable

The Copilot coding agent operates within GitHub’s native control layer, built in the flow of the software development life cycle. The agent starts its work when you assign a GitHub issue to Copilot or ask it to start working from Copilot Chat in VS Code. 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. Developers can give feedback and ask the agent to iterate through pull request reviews.

The agent is expressly designed to preserve your existing security posture, with additional built-in features like branch protections and controlled internet access to ensure safe and policy-compliant development workflows. Plus, the agent’s pull requests require human approval before any CI/CD workflows are run, creating an extra protection control for the build and deployment environment.

With the power of Model Context Protocol (MCP), teams can give the coding agent access to data and capabilities from outside of GitHub. MCP servers can be configured in the repository’s settings.

All SWE agents need a compute environment to do their work. The Copilot coding agent gets to work by spinning up a secure, fully customizable development environment powered by GitHub Actions. Introduced in 2018, Actions is the largest CI/CD ecosystem in the world with more than 25,000 actions in the GitHub Marketplace. Every weekday, GitHub-hosted and self-hosted runners execute more than 40 million daily jobs. By using GitHub Actions, Copilot uses a familiar and powerful compute platform that’s both reliable and secure. GitHub Actions is already powering the world’s open source, started, and large enterprises at scale.

Starting today, the Copilot coding agent is available in preview to all Copilot Enterprise and Copilot Pro+ users. Using the agent consumes Copilot premium requests from a user’s entitlements, included in their Copilot subscription, plus GitHub Actions minutes, which also have an included allowance for every customer.

GitHub also announced new AI capabilities that enable developers to securely build and deploy with greater flexibility and efficiency, including:

- Opening up Copilot: As AI transforms development, we're committed to keeping developers in control. Starting next month, we'll begin open sourcing the GitHub Copilot Chat extension under MIT license, followed by a gradual integration of key AI capabilities directly into VS Code core. Soon every developer can inspect, extend, and help shape how AI works in their editor.

- Extended GitHub Models: Every GitHub user can now enable the Models tab in any repository to build, test, and manage AI features in one place. With prompt management, lightweight evaluations, and enterprise controls, developers can experiment, build, and deploy using industry-leading models on GitHub—with governance and security built in.

- Welcoming Grok to GitHub Models: As developers seek more choice in the models they use, we're expanding what's possible on GitHub. Starting today, xAI’s Grok 3 is available in GitHub Models.

- Expanded agent mode: Agent mode is now rolling out in JetBrains, Eclipse, and Xcode in public preview to all Copilot users, extending Copilot to developers' preferred environments.