GitHub Copilot app: The agent-native desktop experience - The GitHub Blog

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Mario Rodriguez·@mariorod

June 2, 2026

8 minutes

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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.

Get started with the GitHub Copilot app today using your existing Copilot Pro, Pro+, Business, or Enterprise plan. Learn more >

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.

To meet this demand and continue to be the home for all developers (and now their agents), our focus is scaling our underlying systems and improving resilience and stability across all of our services, at every layer of the stack.

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

You start the day with three pieces of work already in motion. One agent is investigating a production bug. Another is implementing a backlog issue. A third is working through review feedback on a pull request. Each is running in its own isolated environment, producing changes you can inspect, redirect, test, and merge.

You need an environment that can keep up.

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.

The GitHub Copilot app is the latest in a line of AI tooling from GitHub that is transforming our business. Moving beyond AI assistance, the app has provided a much-needed control center for agentic development.

Our Forward Deployed Engineers can dispatch a cohort of agents and manage multiple initiatives, all from one location. Easy access to plans and autopilots with the ability to run interactive sessions or step into code where needed.

David Jobling | Master Technology Architect, Head of Technology & Delivery Futures, Global Solutioning & Delivery, Avanade Inc.

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.

Upgrade your Copilot subscription

For agent power users, Copilot Max is available as an upgrade from Copilot Pro, Pro+, and EDU, and is designed to support higher-volume usage without interrupting that flow.

Learn more >

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

Chat is powerful for instruction and ambiguity. But once an agent starts doing real work, a chat thread becomes a long scroll of decisions, logs, and corrections. You need a place where the work itself is visible.

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.

Agents that can only suggest code...