Last week, OpenAI announced a cloud-based software engineering agent called Codex that can perform multiple software engineering tasks in parallel. Now, Microsoft's GitHub is announcing a competitor to Codex. At Build 2025, GitHub announced the GitHub Copilot coding agent, which can implement a task or issue in the background with GitHub Actions.
The GitHub Copilot coding agent is the evolution of Project Padawan, which was introduced earlier this year. Developers can assign a GitHub issue to the Copilot coding agent on github.com, in GitHub Mobile, or through the GitHub CLI. To start the work, the agent will automatically spin up a fully customizable development environment powered by GitHub Actions.
While the agent is working on the issue, developers will be able to track its actions via agent session logs. Once the agent has completed its work, it will raise a pull request, which will require human approval before any CI/CD workflows are run.
Developers can also bring data and capabilities from outside of GitHub to the coding agent using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The GitHub team highlighted that the coding agent can also accept images as input, which will allow developers to share screenshots of a bug or mockups to implement a new feature.
Thomas Dohmke, GitHub CEO, wrote the following regarding the GitHub Copilot coding agent launch:
With the new coding agent, Copilot lives where developers collaborate with each other: right within GitHub. You can hand off time-consuming but boring tasks to Copilot, which will use pull requests, CI/CD, and all of your existing tooling while you focus on the interesting work.
GitHub claims that this new Copilot coding agent will perform better at low-to-medium complexity tasks in well-tested codebases. The Copilot coding agent is now rolling out to all Copilot Enterprise and Copilot Pro+ users. The GitHub team also announced that the Copilot agent mode is coming to popular IDEs, including Xcode, Eclipse, and JetBrains.
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