GitHub launches Agents Panel to streamline workflows and redefine Copilot collaboration

The new GitHub Agents panel serves as a mission control center, enabling developers to delegate tasks, monitor progress, and review pull requests through natural language prompts, while Copilot autonomously drafts, tests, and prepares code changes

GitHub has unveiled a new Agents panel, designed to help developers delegate and track tasks with GitHub Copilot directly from any page on GitHub.com. The feature, announced today, is available immediately to all paid Copilot subscribers across Pro, Pro+, Business, and Enterprise plans.

The Agents panel acts as a lightweight overlay, positioned as a “mission control center” for agentic workflows on GitHub. It enables developers to assign background tasks, monitor progress in real time, and review pull requests without disrupting their existing work.

By entering a natural language prompt and selecting a repository, users can instruct Copilot to create a plan, draft code changes, run tests, and prepare a pull request—all from within the panel. The goal, GitHub said, is to allow developers to stay in flow while Copilot handles coding tasks in the background.

Cross-platform support and improvements

The Copilot coding agent is also integrated across other platforms, including VS Code, GitHub Mobile, JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio, and the GitHub MCP Server, ensuring collaboration across environments. Powered by GitHub Actions, the agent can run builds, tests, and linters securely in the cloud, even when a developer’s computer is offline. Developers retain control via logs, pull request approvals, and feedback options such as mentioning @copilot in reviews.

GitHub highlighted that the Model Context Protocol (MCP) underpins these capabilities, giving Copilot access to repository data, enabling web validation through the Playwright MCP Server, and supporting connections to custom MCP servers.

Since its initial launch, the Copilot coding agent has undergone several enhancements. These include wider availability for all paid subscribers, 20x higher usage efficiency, a built-in browser for validation, customizable instructions, firewall settings, and improved configurability.

Next phase in Copilot evolution

According to GitHub, these upgrades have been designed to make Copilot smarter, more scalable, and accessible across multiple developer surfaces.

The introduction of the Agents panel marks the next phase in GitHub’s push to simplify software development workflows by combining automation, context awareness, and cross-platform integration. The company emphasized that Copilot’s role is not to replace developers but to enable them to focus on higher-level problem-solving while repetitive or procedural coding tasks are handled automatically.

The new Agents panel, along with the upgraded Copilot coding agent, is now available in public preview for all paid Copilot subscribers worldwide.