Microsoft’s GitHub unit on Monday introduced a Copilot artificial intelligence agent that can take on specific programming work and inform people once it has finished. From there, developers can check the agent’s work from GitHub, a widely used repository for code. They can request modifications and then allow GitHub to add the source code to existing files. The launch, announced at Microsoft’s Build developer conference in Seattle, shows that the technology company wants to make AI a more natural part of the process of enhancing software. The coding agent might help Microsoft distinguish its developer tools from alternatives from companies such as Atlassian and GitLab. “Using state-of-the-art models, the agent excels at low-to-medium complexity tasks in well-tested codebases, from adding features and fixing bugs to extending tests, refactoring code, and improving documentation,” Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, wrote in a blog post. Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet AI model powers the coding agent, a GitHub spokesperson said. When you assign an issue to Copilot in GitHub, the coding agent responds with the eyes emoji. It puts its work in a new file and summarizes its work. Rather than being confined to an application for composing code, the agent appears as just another programmer on the team.

Full report : Microsoft’s GitHub unit is enabling developers to summon the Copilot artificial intelligence assistant and ask it to handle specific tasks, such as fixing bugs or rewriting code.