GitHub has added new capabilities to its GitHub Copilot AI-powered coding assistant, including a preview of a new agent mode capable of iterating on its own code. The company also announced the general availability of Copilot Edits in Visual Studio Code.
The updates, announced February 6, serve as an evolution of GitHub Copilot from an AI pair programmer to an agentic peer programmer, as agents become increasingly integral to software development, according to GitHub.
Copilot Edits allows developers to specify a set of files to be edited and prompt Copilot in natural language to immediately make inline changes across multiple files. Agent mode enables Copilot to iterate on its own output as well as the results of that output to complete a user request. Agent mode can recognize and fix its own errors, suggest terminal commands, and analyze runtime errors with self-healing capabilities, GitHub said.
