Agentic AI is all the rage today across multiple sectors, including application development and coding.

Today at long last, GitHub has joined the agentic AI party with the launch of GitHub Copilot agent mode. The promise of agentic AI in development is about enabling developers to build more code with just a simple prompt. The new agent mode will enable Copilot to iterate on its own code and fix errors automatically. Looking forward, GitHub is also previewing a fully autonomous software engineering agent, Project Padawan, that can independently handle entire development tasks.

The new agentic AI features mark the latest step in the multi-year evolution of the AI-powered coding development space that GitHub helped to pioneer. The Microsoft-owned GitHub first previewed GitHub Copilot in 2021, with general availability coming in 2022. In the AI world, that’s a long time ago, before ChatGPT became a household name and most people had ever heard the term “generative AI.”

GitHub has been steadily iterating on Copilot. Initially, the service relied on the OpenAI Codex large language model (LLM). In October 2024, users gained the ability to choose from a variety of LLMs, including Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini 1.5 and OpenAI’s GPT4o. Alongside the agent mode launch, GitHub is now also adding support for Gemini 2.0 Flash and OpenAI’s o3-mini. Microsoft overall has been emphasizing agentic AI, assembling one of the largest AI agent ecosystems in the market.

AI that supports ‘peer programming’

The new GitHub Copilot agent mode service comes as a series of rivals, mostly led by startups, have shaken up the development landscape. Cursor, Replit, Bolt and Lovable are all chasing the growing market for AI-powered development that GitHub helped to create.

When GitHub Copilot first emerged, it was positioned as a pair programming tool, which pairs with a developer. Now, GitHub is leaning into the term peer programming as it embraces agentic AI.

“Developer teams will soon be joined by teams of intelligent, increasingly advanced AI agents that act as peer-programmers for everyday tasks,” said GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. “With today’s launch of GitHub Copilot agent mode, developers can generate, refactor and deploy code across the files of any organization’s codebase with a single prompt command.”

Technical breakdown: How GitHub’s new agent architecture works

Since its initial debut, GitHub Copilot has provided a series of core features. Among them is intelligent code completion, which is the ability to suggest code snippets to execute a given function. Copilot also functions as an assistant, allowing developers to input natural language queries to generate code, or get answers about a specific code base. The system, while intelligent, still requires a non-trivial amount of human interaction.

Agent mode goes beyond that. According to GitHub, the platform enables Copilot to iterate on its own output, as well as the results of that output. This can significantly improve results and code output.

Here’s a detailed breakdown of agent mode operation.

Task understanding and planning:

• When given a prompt, agent mode doesn’t just generate code — it analyzes complete task requirements;
• According to GitHub, the system can “infer additional tasks that were not specified, but are also necessary for the primary request to work”. 

Iterative execution:

• The agent iterates on both its own output and the result of that output;
• It continues iteration until all subtasks are completed.

Self-healing capabilities:

• Automatically recognizes errors in its output;
• Can fix identified issues without developer intervention;
• Analyzes runtime errors and implements corrections;
• Suggests and executes necessary terminal commands.

Project Padawan brings the ‘force’ to development

While agent mode certainly is more powerful than the basic GitHub Copilot operation, it’s still not quite a fully automated experience.

To get to that full experience, GitHub is previewing Project Padawan. In popular culture, a ‘Padawan’ is a reference to a Jedi apprentice from the Star Wars science fiction franchise. 

Project Padawan builds on the agent mode and extends it with more automation. In a blog post, Dohmke noted that Padawan will allow users to assign an issue to GitHub Copilot, and the agentic AI system will handle the entire task. That task can include code development, setting up a repository and assigning humans to review the final code.

“In a sense, it will be like onboarding Copilot as a contributor to every repository on GitHub,” Dohmke said.

Comparing GitHub’s agent to other agentic AI coding options

GitHub in some respects is a late entrant to the agentic AI coding race.

Cursor AI and Bolt AI debuted their first AI agents in 2023, while Replit released its agent in 2024. Those tools have had over a year to iterate, gain a following and develop brand loyalty.

I personally have been experimenting with Replit agents for the last several months. Just this week, the company brought the technology to its mobile app — which you wouldn’t think is a big deal, but it is. The ability to use a simple prompt, without the need for a full desktop setup to build software, is powerful. Replit’s agent also provides AI prompt tuning to help generate the best possible code. The Replit system runs entirely in the cloud and users like me don’t need to download anything. 

Bolt doesn’t have a mobile app, but it does have a really nice web interface that makes it easy for beginners to get started. Cursor is a bit more bulky in that it involves a download, but it is a powerful tool for professional developers.

So how does GitHub Copilot agent mode compare? GitHub is the de facto standard for code repositories on the internet today. More than 150 million developers, including more than 90% of the Fortune 100 companies, use GitHub. According to the company, more than 77,000 organizations have adopted GitHub Copilot. That makes the technology very sticky. Those organizations already relying heavily on GitHub and Copilot are not going to move away from the technology easily.

In comparison to Replit and Bolt, GitHub Copilot agent mode is not a web-based feature, at least not today. Its preview is currently only available with GitHub Copilot in VS code. That creates a small barrier to entry for absolute newbies for sure, but the reality is also that VS code is arguably the most popular and widely used integrated development environment (IDE).

Developers are a picky bunch. That’s why there are so many different programming languages and frameworks (there seems to be a new JavaScript framework emerging every other month). The bottom line is about comfort and workflow. For existing GitHub Copilot and VS code users, the new agent mode brings a much needed feature that will help improve productivity. For those that aren’t stuck in the GitHub Copilot world, agent mode could very well help bring Github Copilot back into the conversation about which agentic AI-driven coding tool to use.

GitHub Copilot agent mode is currently available in preview and requires VS code insiders, which is intended for early adopters. GitHub has not yet provided any pricing details or a date for general availability.