Tag: github-copilot

On 2026-07-31 Microsoft shipped a polyglot unit-test agent in dotnet/skills. The interesting part is the mandatory pre-completion gate that pseudo-mutates your assertions before the agent is allowed to say it is done.

Agent skills and MCP servers in GitHub Copilot code review went GA on 2026-07-29. Here is where the files live, why skills load from the head branch, and why every MCP tool call in a review is read-only.

Claude Code, Cursor, and the GitHub Copilot coding agent all ship host allowlists for outbound traffic, and all three default to something looser than you want. The exact settings keys, a policy you can copy, and the four surfaces the allowlist does not cover.

How to convert .github/prompts/*.prompt.md into .github/skills/<name>/SKILL.md so GitHub Copilot loads them automatically. What breaks, what maps 1:1, and how to verify each skill fires.

Pick Copilot coding agent when the work starts and ends on GitHub and you want issue-to-PR with native branch protection. Pick Cursor cloud agents when you want a live, editor-attached VM, multi-repo tasks, and to take over the run by hand. Full feature matrix, the 59-minute cap, the Actions-approval gotcha, and June 2026 billing for both.

Copilot CLI 1.0.66 and SDK 1.0.5 (public preview, July 1 2026) add per-session AI credit limits. Cap what a single agent run can spend with --max-ai-credits, /limits set, or SessionLimitsConfig, and understand why it is a soft cap that can overshoot.

GitHub Copilot's modernize-dotnet agent shipped as a portable plugin on July 9, 2026. It now runs in VS Code, the Copilot CLI, and on GitHub, with an assess to plan to execute workflow whose artifacts get committed to your repo for review.

When a GitHub Actions job goes red, the Fix with Copilot button hands the failure to the Copilot cloud agent: it reads the logs, pushes a fix to your branch, and tags you for review. Here is where the button lives, the May 18 / June 4 2026 rollout, the Approve and run workflows gotcha that stalls re-runs, how billing works per session, and when to reach for the REST API instead.

POST a prompt to /agents/repos/{owner}/{repo}/tasks and Copilot's cloud agent spins up, writes code, and opens a PR. Here is the exact request, the X-GitHub-Api-Version: 2026-03-10 header, the user-to-server token gotcha that breaks GitHub App installs, a polling loop over the eight task states, and a fan-out script that dispatches the same migration across many repos.

As of the June 11, 2026 change, GitHub Agentic Workflows run on the built-in GITHUB_TOKEN. Add copilot-requests: write, drop the PAT, recompile the lock file, and let safe-outputs apply writes from a privileged step. Full issue-triage example, the token fallback chain, and the two cases where you still need a custom token.