Copilot Workspace Changelog (December 6th, 2024)

As you may have seen in Discord a few weeks ago, Copilot Workspace is graduating! It is a very exciting time, and also a time of change. So before getting into the product changes from this week, we want to highlight a few logistical changes, because everyone loves logistics 💪

Changelog location: All future Copilot Workspace changelogs will be posted here, rather than in the user manual repository. Since you’re already reading this week’s changelog here, you’re ahead of the curve. Great work!

How to provide feedback: We are also transitioning from the current Discord to a GitHub Discussion as the primary place for feedback and discussions around Copilot Workspace. We will still be available in Discord, but posting in the discussion will ensure we see your feedback sooner.

Okay, now onto the product updates for this week! 🎉

Image Preview Support

Building on recent improvements to file and image support, you can now preview images directly in the Workspace editor. Selecting an image from the file tree will now display a full preview of the image, letting you open a preview tab directly within the editor.

copilot workspace with a rendered image in the open tab

Simplifying the Experience

Since our last changes dropped we have invested time into streamlining the Workspace experience, saving you clicks, headaches, and frustration.

Reducing Action Button Clicks

We updated the primary action button such that secondary actions available in the dropdown no longer require a second click of the primary button – when you select an action it will immediately take effect.

the copilot workspace primary action button dropdown

Consolidating the Plan Action Buttons

We have also consolidated plan action buttons like Regenerate and Add File to a kebab menu.

Before:
the previous copilot workspace planning experience

After:
the updated planning experience with actions under a kebab menu

VS Code Extension Updates

  • Stale View Fix: Resolved an issue where stale view states were retained in certain views.
  • Push to Branch / PR Creation Fix: Fixed failures when merging into an existing branch with updates to the same files.
  • Binary Detection Fix: Addressed a false positive issue where folders were incorrectly flagged as binary after session syncing stopped.
  • Enhanced Session List: Sessions now appear earlier in their lifecycle in the session list, supporting the new brainstorming feature in VS Code.
  • Error Message Visibility: Resolved cases where certain error messages did not display.

Copilot Chat now has a 64k context window with OpenAI GPT-4o

Copilot Chat on GitHub.com, GitHub Mobile, the GitHub CLI, as well as officially supported IDEs now have a 64k token window available when working with OpenAI GPT-4o. With this change, customers working with large files and repositories should expect improved responses from Copilot. This change helps Copilot retrieve more information when executing skills to provide contextually relevant responses.

There is no action required on your part to benefit from this upgrade, it is automatically available for all GitHub Copilot users. For more information, check out our documentation and join the discussion within the GitHub Copilot Community.

Hungry for more? – 128k token window for VS Code Insiders

If you’re using GitHub Copilot with Visual Studio Code Insiders, you have access to an even larger 128k context window – the maximum supported by OpenAI GPT-4o. Download the Insiders build to try it out.

See more

Actions metrics improvements: adding runner labels

Starting today, you can now view runner labels in the Jobs tab of your Actions metrics. You can filter by the runner label to view runner specific metrics and answer questions such as:
– “What is the average queue time for my runner?”
– “Which repositories are using my runner?”
– “Which jobs are using the ubuntu-latest label?”

Performance metrics screen with runner label filter applied

To access the feature, on your organization home page, select Insights near the top of the page, and then select ‘Actions Performance Metrics’ on the left side of the page.
To learn more about GitHub Actions Metrics, check out our public documentation or head to our community discussion to ask questions and provide feedback.

See more
View all changes