github-copilot

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.

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.