Transcription
It shows how much of a nerd I am. But I even find myself, you know, I'm at the gym or maybe even going to bed and I like think of something that I want to do in my open source project. I can just hand that task to C-pilot and get it done and I come back an hour later or whatever and I've got something that I can review and and start playing with, which is really, really cool.
>> Welcome back, Tim. Thank you for being here.
>> Thank you. It's great to be here again. I can't quite believe how time flies.
>> I'm excited for you to show us what is new with the GitHub Copilot coding agent.
Yes, I think it makes sense to kind of start just by setting the context on on what Copilot coding agent is. So, it's a autonomous developer agent that can do coding tasks, but the big difference between it and some of the other things that you might have used is that it runs in the background in the cloud. So, you give it a task and then it makes changes, validates its work, and then creates a pull request and tags you for a view. And none of that requires, you know, you to be on your computer. So you can shut your laptop, go and get some lunch, go and make a coffee, and co-pilot can go and work in the background.
Last week, we launched something that I'm particularly excited about, which we call the agents panel. And this is a new overlay that is available on every screen on GitHub where you can easily send new tasks to Copilot and also easily track the progress of stuff that Copilot's already doing for you. I've opened up this panel with a button. It automatically picks the repo that I'm on right now. And then I can just describe a task that I want Copilot to do. So I can say like upgrade Node.js to the latest version and then hit start task and then C-pilot's going to pick up that task, start working on in the background in a PR and then ping you when it's done. And a really nice thing here as well that we added recently is the ability to pick a branch when you do that. So this new panel makes it much easier to track co-pilot's tasks, much easier to hand new tasks to co-pilot during the background and means that even if you're not using issues to everything, it gives you a really easy entry point to to start doing that.
>> Wait, so I can assign issues to the coding agent from the mobile app as well?
>> That's right. Yeah, we have the ability to assign issues to co-pilot from mobile. Right now we don't have this kind of like tasks experience that skips the issues and lets you just go straight to getting copilot to do something. But that is something that we're working on. So excited to bring more of this agents experience into GitHub mobile as well.
Another thing that we launched recently that I'm really excited about is giving Copilot its own web browser which means that it can do a much better job of working on web applications. So if you have a website or web app, Copilot can test the work that it's doing and even help you to understand how that's working. So this is a PR that I got copilot to create for me a month or so ago and I asked it to add internationalization support to a website and I scroll down and not only has Copilot like written the code for me, but it also shares a screenshot of the changes that it's made. I can quickly validate the work without even having to like dive into the details and jump into the code or check out the branch. This is really really cool. It's actually powered by MCP. So we have a bunch of MCP servers that are enabled for Copilot coding agent by default and one of them is the Playright MCP server which is a way of giving agents a web browser and with that web browser the agent can browse to websites including ones like running in its local server and take screenshots and then share them with me. I probably still want to check this out locally and I might want to check it out or like deploy it to a preview environment, but still getting that instant feedback in the pull request is super super useful and it's something that I wish every developer would do. And as we're building this product, that's what we think about. You know, what are the things that you wish all of your colleagues, all of your collaborators would do and how can we make co-pilot do those things? Not to sound like an LLM, but this is a game changer because before if you wanted to an improvement, you have to manually kicked off like I don't know what this particular app is built on, but you have to like literally run the server locally, do your own investigating or inspection of whatever elements were added. But now with the Playright NCP and GitHub copilot coding agent, I don't have to worry about that.
>> Yeah, it's a big a pretty chunky PR. I actually spent about 50 minutes doing this. That's quite a quite a big piece of work, but it comes back with some, you know, solid code, meets my coding standards, passes tests, all those kind of things. We want to make sure that this agent is always running your tests, always running your lint, always running the build process so that it is producing code that actually passes and can get reviewed and can get approved.
>> What other MCP servers are enabled for GitHub copilot?
>> Yeah, we currently have two MCP servers that we turn on by default. So we have the playright one for like this web browsing and taking screenshots and we have the GitHub MCP server installed by default as well. And that's really useful because it means that the agent can like go and take a look at other issues in the repo. It can maybe take a look at past pull requests as inspiration for its work. And of course you can add your own MCP servers as well. So we've seen people use the notion MCP server so it can read their notes and read their like scoping documents and things like that. And there are so many other great MCP servers out there that you can connect in which is really great.
The number one thing where we're seeing engineers at GitHub using Copilot Coding Agent is actually tech debt. So most teams, you know, have loads of projects, they've got loads of tasks to do and they're always struggling to keep up. And that can often mean that doing refactoring or improving your test coverage or upgrading dependencies can be something that falls to the bottom of the backlog or you can't do. And it turns out that actually co-pilot is often really great at doing these kind of tasks because they often don't require like huge amounts of intelligence or like super, you know, deep thinking. Doing small refactors to improve code style or even removing feature flags that are kind of shipped and done. Those kind of things are are proving really really successful with with Copilot coding agent.
Lots of developers using this as a way to like get started on a new feature. So you don't have to let C-pilot do all the work. It doesn't have to do things perfectly, but maybe it can kind of get things started and then you can finish. So, obviously, it's great if it can do it perfect first time and it does all the work for you. That's amazing. That's ideal. But even if it doesn't do everything for you, it can still be super valuable to get the first 70 or 80% done and then you can pick up the rest and finish it off and push it over the line and you get the credit, which is great.
>> Can you tell us a little bit about what the expenses there for people that are assigning tasks to the copilot coding agent?
Copilot coding agent now only costs one premium request each time you either ask it to create a PR or ask it to make changes to a PR. If you get 300 premium requests that means you can create up to 300 pull requests if you used all those premium requests for coding agent. That's a lot of usage. So it's it can go a very long way. Also what important to note that on top of that it uses GitHub actions under the hood. So GitHub actions minutes are going to be used as well. But if you have GitHub actions minutes available for free, for example, like you're in an open- source repo or your organization has an allowance of actions minutes already, then you can use those for copilot coding agents. So doesn't necessarily have to cost you anything. When we launched this, it was only for pro plus and enterprise, which are our like top tier ones, but now we brought it to all the paid plans.
>> What's on the pipeline? Anything you can share?
We're hearing lots of people within GitHub and lots of developers out there in the world as well saying like why can't I mention co-pilot in my PR and ask it to like fix the tests or get the build to pass or add this make this change. That's something that we're working on right now and and super pumped to see that go out there. Another thing I'm really excited about is better API access. So, we're looking to ship soon a public API so you can easily just like send tasks to C-pilot to do. So, that can allow new kinds of automations that aren't possible right now. Automations that lead to code being written, which I think is going to be pretty exciting and and pretty useful for people. And another third thing that we're working on that I'm I think is going to make a big difference is Copilot being able to like more easily fix when when the GitHub actions build failed. We want you to be able to get work done, merge that work, move on and and be more productive and have more fun as well. Hopefully,
>> if I'm watching this and I think, you know, what would be a really cool thing that the coding agent could do for me? How can folks get this feedback to you?
>> Yeah, the best way of doing that is through the GitHub community generally. We're active on there. We have a bunch of discussion threads where people can share feedback. We're also definitely like active on X and Reddit and LinkedIn and all those kind of places. I definitely want to hear people's feedback as well. My email is on my GitHub profile. So feel free to reach out with any thoughts or comments. I always want to hear it because ultimately what we're all about is just trying to make this product as useful as possible for you.
>> We are in the age of the true peer programmer. The future is bright for the GitHub Copilot coding agent. If you haven't tried it out, give it a go because this is amazing.
>> Thank you.
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