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GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

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Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#171

Post by timrogers »

dsl wrote: post #127
timrogers wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In the repo where we're building the agent, the agent itself is actually the #5 contributor How does this align with Microsoft's AI safety principals? What controls are in place to prevent Copilot from deciding that it could be more effective with less limitations?

Copilot only does work that has been assigned to it by a developer, and all the code that the agent writes has to go through a pull request before it can be merged. In fact, Copilot has no write access to GitHub at all, except to push to its own branch.

That ensures that all of Copilot's code goes through our normal review process which requires a review from an independent human.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#172

Post by timrogers »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #83
timrogers wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In the repo where we're building the agent, the agent itself is actually the #5 contributor - so we really are using Copilot coding agent to build Copilot coding agent ;) Really cool, thanks for sharing! Would you perhaps consider implementing something like these stats that aider keeps on "aider writing itself"? - https://aider.chat/HISTORY.html

Nice idea! We're going to try to get together a blog post in the next couple of weeks on how we're using Copilot coding agent at GitHub - including to build Copilot coding agent ;) - and having some live stats would be pretty sweet too.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#173

Post by timrogers »

leptons wrote: post #167
timrogers wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm most excited about is allowing developers to spend more of their time working on the work they enjoy, and less of their time working on mundane, boring or annoying tasks. Most developers don't love writing tests, or updating documentation, or working on tricky dependency updates - and I really think we're heading to a world where AI can take the load of that and free me up to work on the most interesting and…

> allowing developers to spend more of their time working on the work they enjoy, and less of their time working on mundane, boring or annoying tasks. I get paid for the mundane, boring, annoying tasks, and I really like getting paid .

But would you rather get paid to spend your time doing the interesting and enjoying work, or the mundane and boring stuff? ;) My hope is that agents like Copilot can help us burn down the tedious stuff and make more time for the big value adds.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#174

Post by leptons »

eterm wrote: post #149
shepherdjerred wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can "Save" 1,000 hours every night, but you don't actuall get those 1,000 hours back. What do you mean? If I have some task that requires 1000 hours, and I'm able to shave it down to one hour, then I did just "save" 999 hours -- just in the same way that if something costs $5 and I pay $4, I saved $

My point is that saving 1,000 hours each day doesn't actually give you 1,000 hours a day to do things with. You still get your 24 hours, no matter how much time you save. What actually matters is the value of what is delivered, not how much time it actually saves you. Justifying costs by "time saved" is a good way to eat up your money on time-saving devices.

If I "save 1000 hours" then that could be distributed over 41.666 days, so no task would need to be performed during that period because "I saved 1000 hours".

You could also say you saved 41.666 people an entire 24 hour day, by "saving 1000 hours", or some other fractional way.

How you're trying to explain it as "saving 1000 hours each day" is really not making any sense without further context.

And I'm sure if I hadn't written this comment I would be saving 1000 hours on a stupid comment thread.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#175

Post by timrogers »

hollowturtle wrote: post #151
timrogers wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 1,000 pull requests contributed by Copilot I'd like a breakdown of this phrase, how much human work vs Copilot and in what form, autocomplete vs agent. It's not specified seems more like a marketing trickery than real data

The "1,000 pull requests contributed by Copilot" datapoint is specifically referring to Copilot coding agent over the past 2.5 months.

Pretty much every developer at GitHub is using Copilot in their day to work, so its influence touches virtually every code change we make ;)

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#176

Post by timrogers »

ilaksh wrote: post #60
timrogers wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

At the moment, we're using Claude 3.7 Sonnet, but we're keeping our options open to change the model down the line, and potentially even to introduce a model picker like we have for Copilot Chat and Agent Mode.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#177

Post by timrogers »

shwouchk wrote: post #67

I played around with it quite a bit. it is both impressive and scary. most importantly, it tends to indiscriminately use dependencies from random tiny repos, and often enough not the correct ones, for major projects. buyer beware.

Thanks for flagging this! That isn't a behavior I've seen before in testing, and I'd love to dig into it more to see what's happening.

Would you be able to drop me an email? My address is my HN login @github.com.

(I work on the product team for Copilot coding agent.)

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#179

Post by timrogers »

yellow_lead wrote: post #124
shwouchk wrote: post #67

I played around with it quite a bit. it is both impressive and scary. most importantly, it tends to indiscriminately use dependencies from random tiny repos, and often enough not the correct ones, for major projects. buyer beware.

Given that PRs run actions in a more trusted context for private repos, this is a bit concerning.

As we've built Copilot coding agent, we've put a lot of thought and work into our security story.

One of the things we've done here is to treat Copilot's commits like commits from a first-time contributor to an open source project.

When Copilot pushes changes, your GitHub Actions workflows won't run by default, and you'll have to click the "Approve and run workflows" button in the merge box.

That gives you the chance to run Copilot's code before it runs in Actions and has access to your secrets.

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

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#180

Post by timrogers »

sethops1 wrote: post #130

> Copilot coding agent is rolling out to GitHub Mobile users on iOS and Android, as well as GitHub CLI. Wait, is this going to pollute the `gh` tool? Please tell me this isn't happening.

Don't worry - this is 100% opt in. We've just added the ability to assign Copilot to an issue from `gh issue edit` and other similar commands.

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

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