GitHub Copilot’s New AI Coding Agent Saves Developers Time – And Requires Their Oversight

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At Microsoft’s Build developer conference, GitHub announced the rollout of a new AI coding agent built directly into GitHub Copilot. This upgraded assistant can now handle development tasks like fixing bugs, writing features, refactoring code, and improving documentation.

Developers can assign issues to Copilot through GitHub.com, GitHub Mobile, or the GitHub command-line interface, just like assigning them to a human. The agent reacts with a 👀 emoji and kicks off its work.

Behind the scenes, it boots up a virtual machine, clones your repo, configures its environment, and starts reading your codebase. It uses retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and GitHub code search to understand what’s going on and what it needs to do.

Built-in security, and ...