Tag: github-copilot

Claude Code and GitHub Copilot both ship allowedMcpServers and deniedMcpServers, but the matchers behave differently. serverName is a fallback that a single serverCommand entry silently disables, deny is a union while allow is not, and an invalid allowlist locks everything out.

GitHub's August 6, 2026 changelog adds allowedMcpServers and deniedMcpServers to copilot/managed-settings.json. URL and argv matchers, deny-wins precedence, and a fail-closed default the older name-based registry never had.

GitHub's August 3, 2026 changelog adds a comment trigger to Copilot cloud agent automations, replacing the issue_comment workflow plus PAT plus REST dispatch that teams have been hand-rolling since June.

Microsoft.Agents.AI.GitHub.Copilot 1.16.0 shipped on July 30, 2026. The Copilot CLI runtime now sits behind the ordinary AIAgent abstraction, permissions are deny-by-default, and Squad plugs a whole agent team in as one AIAgent.

Visual Studio 2026 18.8 puts expert-authored .NET and Azure agent skills in the tool picker under a Built-in category, disabled by default. The default is the interesting part.

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.