GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is the AI coding assistant built by GitHub, the Microsoft-owned platform where much of the world's software is hosted. It began as an autocomplete-style pair programmer and has grown into a broad suite that spans the whole development lifecycle, from inline suggestions in the editor to autonomous agents that complete tasks on their own. It works across IDEs including VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains, Eclipse, and Xcode, as well as GitHub.com, a command-line interface, mobile, and chat tools like Slack and Teams.

At the everyday level, Copilot offers code completions and next-edit suggestions that predict and propose a developer's next change, plus a chat interface for explaining code, writing tests, and debugging. Copilot Edits applies natural-language changes across multiple files at once. The bigger shift is agent mode, where Copilot picks the files to touch, proposes and runs terminal commands, reads the output, and iterates until a multi-step task is done, attempting to fix its own build failures along the way.

Beyond the editor, Copilot can run work asynchronously. Its cloud coding agent takes an assigned issue, from GitHub Issues or tools like Jira and Linear, researches the repository, makes changes on a branch in a sandboxed environment, runs tests, reviews its own diff, scans for security and secret issues, and opens a pull request for review. A separate Copilot CLI brings autonomous and plan-based modes to the terminal with parallel sub-agents and memory across sessions, and an agentic code-review feature reads related files and dependencies before commenting on a pull request.

Copilot is increasingly model-flexible and open to other agents. Developers can choose among frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI, and through GitHub's Agent HQ direction, Copilot acts as a control plane for orchestrating both its own and third-party coding agents like Claude and Codex from one place. It supports the Model Context Protocol for connecting external tools and data, having replaced its older extension system, and adds features like a natural-language app builder and screenshot-to-code generation.

For organizations, Copilot adds policy and access controls, audit data, codebase indexing, security scanning of generated code, and IP indemnity, with billing moving toward usage-based GitHub AI Credits.