Managing Copilot coding agents

View your agent's progress and keep Copilot on task.

Who can use this feature?

Copilot coding agent is available with the GitHub Copilot Pro, GitHub Copilot Pro+, GitHub Copilot Business and GitHub Copilot Enterprise plans. The agent is available in all repositories stored on GitHub, except repositories owned by managed user accounts and where it has been explicitly disabled.
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In this article

When utilizing GitHub's agentic features, you can use the Agents tab as a centralized control page where you can initiate, monitor, and manage agent tasks across GitHub.

Note

The Agents tab is in public preview and subject to change.

1. Select a repository and choose your agent

  1. Start a new agent task.

    • Open the Agents tab.
    • Use the Task button or /task command from Copilot Chat.
    • Open the Agents panel by clicking the at the top of any page on GitHub

  2. Using the dropdown menu, select the repository you want Copilot to work in.

  3. Optionally, select a base branch for Copilot's pull request.

  4. Optionally, you can click to open the "Custom agent" dropdown menu, if you want to assign a custom agent with specialized behavior and tools. You can select an existing custom agent from your repository, organization, or enterprise. You can also click Create an agent to create a new agent profile in your selected repository and branch. For more information, see Creating custom agents.

  5. Type a prompt describing your request. For example:

    Implement a user-friendly message for common errors.

  6. Click Start task or press Return.

Copilot will start work on the task and begin pushing changes to a new pull request, where it will automatically add you as a reviewer.

For more information on ways to start new agent tasks, see Asking GitHub Copilot to create a pull request.

2. Monitor agent activity

Once Copilot starts working, it will continue to update the session log and overview with its progress and thought process.

Each session displays its status. Click on a session to open the session log, where you can monitor the agent's progress and the session length. You can view the overview, file diff, premium request usage, and session count by clicking the Open workbench button.

Screenshot of the top-right corner of the agents tab on GitHub. The "Open workbench button is highlighted in a dark orange outline.

Agent sessions can also be tracked from the GitHub CLI, GitHub Mobile, Visual Studio Code, Raycast, and JetBrains IDEs. For more information, see Tracking GitHub Copilot's sessions.

3. Redirect agents as needed

You can step in and provide steering input to Copilot without stopping the run. Steering uses one premium request per message.

Reasons you might want to steer a session include:

  • Copilot appears to be going in a wrong direction, and you want to give it more clarity.
  • You made a mistake in your description of the required work, and you've decided to start over.

In the prompt box under the agent session log, prompt Copilot as it is working on a task. For example:

Use our existing ErrorHandler utility class instead of writing custom try-catch blocks for each endpoint.

Copilot will start implementing your input after it has finished its current tool call.

4. Open an agent session in your local development environment

You can guide Copilot in your local development environment on further changes, or make any edits that require human expertise.

Click the Code button in the top-right of the agent session view and select "Open in VS Code Insiders" to launch the session directly in VS Code.

Note

Opening a session in VS Code Insiders requires the latest versions of VS Code Insiders, the GitHub Copilot extension, and the GitHub Pull Requests extension.

5. Review and merge agent code

Once Copilot completes a session, you can click Open workbench and click the Overview tab to read through the summary of changes Copilot has made. Select the Files changed tab to scan the diff of the pull request. If the changes look ready for a final review, navigate to the pull request to approve and merge the changes. See Reviewing a pull request created by GitHub Copilot.