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GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

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41–50 of 372 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#41
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…

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#42
post #4

> Copilot excels at low-to-medium complexity tasks Oh cool! > in well-tested codebases Oh ok never mind

In my experience it works well even without good testing, at least for greenfield projects. It just works best if there are already tests when creating updates and patches.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#43

My buddy is at GH working on an adjacent project & he hasn't stopped talking about this for the last few days. I think I've been reminded to 'make sure I tune into the keynote on Monday' at least 8 times now. I gave up trying to watch the stream after the third authentication timeout, but if I'd known it was this I'd maybe have tried a fourth time.

Word of advice: just go to YouTube and skip the MS registration tax

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#44
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 contributed by Copilot.

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 ;)

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

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#45
post #4

> Copilot excels at low-to-medium complexity tasks Oh cool! > in well-tested codebases Oh ok never mind

As peer commenters have noted, coding agent can be really good at improving test coverage when needed.

But also as a slightly deeper observation - agentic coding tools really do benefit significantly from good test coverage. Tests are a way to “box in” the agent and allow it to check its work regularly. While they aren’t necessary for these tools to work, they can enable coding agents to accomplish a lot more on your behalf.

(I work on Copilot coding agent)

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#46
post #23
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…

I feel like I saw a quote recently that said 20-30% of MS code is generated in some way. [0] In any case, I think this is the best use case for AI in programming—as a force multiplier for the developer. It’s for the best benefit of both AI and humanity for AI to avoid diminishing the creativity, agency and critical thinking skills of its human operators. AI should be task oriented, but high level decision-making and…

How much was previously generated by intellisense and other code gen tools before AI? What is the delta?

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#47

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

Are you thinking if Copilot Workspaces? That seemed to drop off the Github changelog after February. I’m wondering if that team got reallocated to the copilot agent.

Probably. Also this new feature seems like an expansion/refinement of Copilot Workspaces to better fit the classic Github UX: "assign an issue to Copilot to get a PR" sounds exactly like the workflow Copilot Workspaces wanted to have when it grew up.

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#49

Check in unreviewed slop straight into the codebase. Awesome.

Copilot pushes its work to a branch and creates a pull request, and then it's up to you to review its work, approve and merge.

Copilot literally can't push directly to the default branch - we don't give it the ability to do that - precisely because we believe that all AI-generated code (just like human generated code) should be carefully reviewed before it goes to production.

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

Re: GitHub Copilot Coding Agent

#50
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…

So I need to ask: what is the overall goal of your project? What will you do in, say, 5 years from now?
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