GitHub Copilot app: The agent-native desktop experience

Published: June 2, 2026

While the agentic shift has made development faster, it’s also led to disjointed workflows, more context switching, and too much time spent reviewing agent-generated code.

If agents are going to be a durable part of how software gets built, they need a real place in the developer workflow. Yet most developer tools were not designed for directing multiple agents in parallel. Context scatters across windows. You lose track of what’s running. Code lands in pull requests without a clear trail of what the agent tried, what it validated, or where human judgment is needed.

Across GitHub, developers are using agents to move from prompt to plan, from issue to pull request, from review feedback to merged code. As agentic workflows become the norm, repository creation, pull request activity, and API usage are all accelerating with no evidence of slowing down. On GitHub alone, commits nearly doubled year over year, crossing 1.4 billion per month, plus over 2 billion GitHub Actions minutes a week.

GitHub is building that system for the agentic frontier, and that’s what we’re showing today at Microsoft Build.

Copilot app: A control center for agent-native development

The new GitHub Copilot app is the agent-native desktop experience built on GitHub. From a single My Work view, you can see work in motion across connected repositories: active sessions, issues, pull requests, and background automations. The Copilot app is now available in technical preview for existing Copilot Pro, Pro+, Business, and Enterprise users.

Every session runs in its own git worktree, a real, isolated copy of your branch. This helps parallel agent sessions work without stepping on each other. The app handles every worktree for you: no manual setup, no cleanup, no branch juggling. Whether you start from a prompt or an issue from your inbox, Copilot gets the context it needs from existing issues, pull requests, and the repos you’ve connected.

Then Agent Merge helps carry that pull request through review, checks, and merge. It monitors CI, tracks required reviewers, addresses failing checks, and waits for all conditions to be satisfied. You choose how far Copilot should go: drive CI back to green, address feedback, or merge when your conditions are met. You decide what automation is enabled and what ships.

Canvas: Where intent becomes inspectable work

Today, we’re also introducing canvases in the GitHub Copilot app. Canvases are bidirectional work surfaces for humans and agents. A canvas might show a plan, pull request, browser session, terminal, deployment, dashboard, or workflow state. Agents update the canvas as they work, and developers can edit, reorder, approve, or redirect that work on the same surface.

This is the beginning of agent experience (AX) in the Copilot app: interfaces where people and agents operate together. Chat is where you instruct, discuss, and reason through ambiguity. Canvases are where that intent becomes visible work you can inspect, steer, and verify.

Cloud and local sandboxes

Cloud and local sandboxes for GitHub Copilot give agents a bounded place to act. Choose where Copilot runs—on your local machine or in the cloud—and begin unlocking agent-driven workflows while prioritizing security and enterprise policy enforcement, and without local resource constraints.

With local sandboxing, Copilot runs in an isolated environment directly on your machine, with restricted access to filesystems, network connectivity, and system capabilities. Local sandbox policies can be centrally configured and enforced.

In the cloud, each sandbox runs in a fully isolated, ephemeral Linux environment hosted by GitHub. Organizations define their own policies. From the cloud, you can pick up Copilot sessions anywhere, on any device, with remote control.

Code review that scales with agentic output

Copilot code review brings an adaptable, agentic system to filter through the noise, allowing you to focus your energy where it matters most while Copilot conducts code reviews.

You can now extend Copilot so every review reflects your own standards, internal systems, and engineering context via custom agent skills, MCP server connections, and configurable actions workflows.

Copilot code review now offers medium tier review, which routes pull requests to a higher-reasoning model for better precision and recall. Admins can set guidelines for individual repositories to “low” or “medium.”

The /security-review skill gives Copilot a dedicated path for security-focused evaluation. The /rubberduck skill is now generally available to use multiple model families to critique your implementation and find novel issues.

One runtime for apps, tools, and agents

You can now build your own tools with the GitHub Copilot SDK. Now generally available in Node.js/TypeScript, Python, Go, .NET, Rust, and Java, it exposes the same agentic runtime that powers the Copilot app.

For developers who prefer to work in the terminal, Copilot CLI now has a redesigned interface, voice input, and scheduled tasks to keep you there. Copilot CLI has a redesigned TUI in /experimental mode with tabbed access to pull requests, issues, and gists from the terminal. Voice mode uses on-device speech-to-text, so audio never leaves your machine. /every schedules recurring prompts and background tasks.

Cloud automations let agents run on a schedule, respond to GitHub events, open issues, and leave comments. By default, the cloud agent asks permission before each write action. Switch to autopilot once you have established trust.

Memory++ and /chronicle give Copilot continuity across devices and over time. Query context from sessions started in the app, CLI, VS Code, or on GitHub.

Partner-built agent apps integrate with GitHub Copilot to help automate tasks, generate code, analyze context, and execute actions. Partners include LaunchDarkly, Bright, Amplitude, Sonar, Endor Labs, Octopus Deploy, Packfiles, PagerDuty, and Miro.

Editor’s note (June 5, 2026): The GitHub Copilot app technical preview expanded to all existing Copilot Pro, Pro+, Business, and Enterprise customers. Download available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.