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GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

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51–60 of 372 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#52
post #7

These kinds of patterns allow compute to take much more time than a single chat since it is asynchronous by nature, which I think is necessary to get to working solutions on harder problems

Yes. This is a really key part of why Copilot coding agent feels very different to use than Copilot agent mode in VS Code.

In coding agent, we encourage the agent to be very thorough in its work, and to take time to think deeply about the problem. It builds and tests code regularly to ensure it understands the impact of changes as it makes them, and stops and thinks regularly before taking action.

These choices would feel too “slow” in a synchronous IDE based experience, but feel natural in a “assign to a peer collaborator” UX. We lean into this to provide as rich of a problem solving agentic experience as possible.

(I’m working on Copilot coding agent)

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#53
post #37

I wish they optimized things before adding more crap that will slow things down even more. The only thing that's fast with copilot is the autocomplete, it sometimes takes several minutes to make edits on a 100 line file regardless of the model I pick (some are faster than others). If these models had a close to 100% hit rate this would be somewhat fine, but going back and forth with something that takes this long is…

My experience has mostly been the opposite -- changes to several-hundred-line files usually only take a few seconds.

That said, months ago I did experience the kind of slow agent edit times you mentioned. I don't know where the bottleneck was, but it hasn't come back.

I'm on library WiFi right now, "vibe coding" (as much as I dislike that term) a new tool for my customers using Copilot, and it's snappy.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#54
post #35
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of that is protobuf stubs and other forms of banal autogenerate code?

Updated my comment to include the link. As much as 30% specifically generated by AI.

The 2nd paragraph contradicts the title.

The actual quote by Satya says, "written by software".

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#56

GitHub had this exact feature late last year itself, perhaps under a slightly different name.

I think you're probably thinking of Copilot Workspace (https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilo...>).

Copilot Workspace could take a task, implement it and create a PR - but it had a linear, highly structured flow, and wasn't deeply integrated into the GitHub tools that developers already use like issues and PRs.

With Copilot coding agent, we're taking all of the great work on Copilot Workspace, and all the learnings and feedback from that project, and integrating it more deeply into GitHub and really leveraging the capabilities of 2025's models, which allow the agent to be more fluid, asynchronous and autonomous.

(Source: I'm the product lead for Copilot coding agent.)

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#58

Is Copilot a classic case of slow megacorp gets outflanked by more creative and unhindered newcomers (ie Cursor)? It seems Copilot could have really owned the vibe coding space. But that didn’t happen. I wonder why? Lots of ideas gummed up in organizational inefficiencies, etc?

This is a direct threat to Cursor. The smarter the models get, the less often programmers really need to dig into an IDE, even one with AI in it. Give it a couple of years and there will be a lot of projects that were done just by assigning tasks where no one even opened Cursor or anything.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#59
post #28

I have been so far disappointed by copilot's offerings. It's just not good enough for anything valuable. I don't want you to write my getter and setter. And call it a day.

I think we expected disappointment with this one. (I expected it at least)[0]

But the upgraded Copilot was just in response to Cursor and Winsurf.

We'll see.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43904611

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#60
post #13

> Copilot excels at low-to-medium complexity tasks in well-tested codebases, from adding features and fixing bugs to extending tests, refactoring, and improving documentation. Bounds bounds bounds bounds. The important part for humans seems to be maintaining boundaries for AI. If your well-tested codebase has the tests built thru AI, its probably not going to work. I think its somewhat telling that they can't share n…

We've been using Copilot coding agent internally at GitHub, and more widely across Microsoft, for nearly three months. That dogfooding has been hugely valuable, with tonnes of valuable feedback (and bug bashing!) that has helped us get the agent ready to launch today. So far, the agent has been used by about 400 GitHub employees in more than 300 our our repositories, and we've merged almost 1,000 pull requests contri…

What model does it use? gpt-4.1? Or can it use o3 sometimes? Or the new Codex model?
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