Copilot Pro users can now delegate tasks to Copilot to work on in the background with GitHub Copilot coding agent, available today in public preview. Those on Student, Teacher, or OSS Maintainer Pro plans will receive access to the Copilot coding agent early next week.

To get started, you can assign an issue to Copilot just as you would to another developer, or ask Copilot to open a pull request from Copilot Chat.

Copilot works in the background, using its own secure cloud-based development environment powered by GitHub Actions. Copilot explores the repository, makes changes, and even validates its work with your tests and linter before it pushes.

Once Copilot is done, it’ll tag you for review. You can ask Copilot to make changes by leaving comments in the pull request. Or, check out the branch locally and continue work in your IDE, with Copilot at your side.

Using the agent consumes GitHub Actions minutes and Copilot premium requests, starting from entitlements included with your plan.

To get started and to see our top tips for getting the best results with Copilot, check out our Copilot coding agent documentation.