Allison shares news about updates to the GitHub Copilot coding agent, highlighting enhanced branch naming and pull request title generation for streamlined developer workflows.

Copilot Coding Agent: Better Branch Names and Pull Request Titles

GitHub has introduced a new update to the Copilot coding agent, an asynchronous, autonomous background agent designed to assist developers by performing tasks in the background and later requesting a review.

Key Improvements

  • Improved Branch Names:
    • Copilot now generates branch names that directly describe the work being done, such as copilot/add-theme-switcher, instead of using random identifiers like copilot/fix-bdaf7923-9865-4ef5-8c17-05ae939937a3.
  • Smarter Pull Request Titles:
    • Rather than reusing the original prompt as a title, Copilot automatically generates a descriptive pull request title. For example, if prompted with “Implement a CSV to Markdown converter in Rust. Ensure that it has CI/CD configured with GitHub Actions,” the pull request title might become “Implement CSV to Markdown converter with GitHub Actions workflows.”

Availability and Access

  • The Copilot coding agent is available to users with Copilot Pro, Copilot Pro+, Copilot Business, and Copilot Enterprise subscriptions.
  • For Copilot Business and Enterprise users, administrators must enable the agent from the “Policies” page before use.

How It Works

  1. Developers delegate tasks to Copilot.
  2. Copilot creates a new work branch and opens a draft pull request.
  3. Improved naming and titling make it easier to track, understand, and review changes.

These changes aim to improve the developer experience by making collaboration and source control workflows clearer and more efficient.

For more details, refer to the GitHub documentation.

This post appeared first on “The GitHub Blog”. Read the entire article here