GitHub Copilot has a new coding agent—and it’s ready to join your team. From planning to production, the entire software development lifecycle is being reimagined through intelligent agents—with you at the helm. At Microsoft Build 2025, we’re diving into the seismic shift happening in software development—and unveiling the future we’ll build together.
Just a few weeks ago, as we celebrated Microsoft’s fiftieth anniversary, we reflected on the original vision: a “software factory.” From the start, Microsoft has been built by developers, for developers. Now as we enter our fifty-first year, we’re reimagining what that factory looks like—with you at the center of a new era of software creation.
Being a developer is like being a wizard: you dream up what’s possible and bring it to life with code. But as apps and systems grow more complex, demands increase, and technical debt piles up, the magic can fade. Coding turns into maintenance and momentum stalls. We want to help you break free from the grind—so you can rediscover the joy, your flow, and the magic of building.
GitHub Copilot has already transformed the way we code—which is why 15 million developers rely on it to build faster. But writing new code is just one small part of the job. The rest of a developer’s day is packed with designing systems, digging through docs, debugging, refactoring, and wrestling with legacy code.
That’s where agentic workflows with GitHub Copilot come in. They’re helping us move faster from idea to production, boost code quality, accelerate collaboration, strengthen security, and now address technical debt and keep apps running smoothly in production.
Introducing agentic DevOps
This is the foundation of a new approach we’re calling agentic DevOps—the next evolution of DevOps, reimagined for a world where intelligent agents collaborate with you and with each other. The agents automate and optimize every stage of the software lifecycle. It’s like adding a crew of tireless teammates to your developer squad—handling bug fixes, small features, documentation, and more—so you can stay focused on the work that matters most.
In the old world, software development was a long, slow relay—weeks to plan, months to build, quarters to launch. Today, ideas become prototypes in hours and reach production in days. Agentic DevOps will help you build faster, crush your backlog, cancel tech debt, secure your apps, and keep it all running in production. The best part is we keep you at the center of this orchestra, conducting agents, and approving recommendations, so you can get back to building epic stuff.
GitHub Copilot is your path out of the grind—so you can build with joy, escape the mundane, and find that creative spark that brought you to this industry in the first place. It’s so much more than code completion: Copilot is already reviewing code, surfacing vulnerabilities, and helping resolve them before they reach production. Here’s what’s new and how it all fits together to make agentic DevOps a reality. Don’t forget to check out Thomas Dohmke‘s, GitHub CEO, take on the latest with GitHub Copilot.
- Agent mode: Agent mode supercharges everything you already love about GitHub Copilot—now applied to complex, multistep coding tasks in a seamless, collaborative experience. It can analyze entire codebases, make edits across files, generate and run tests, fix bugs, and even suggest terminal commands—all from a single prompt. And now, it’s available in all your favorite code editors: Microsoft Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio, JetBrains, Eclipse, and Xcode.
- New coding agent: Our newest coding agent levels up GitHub Copilot from a pair programmer to peer—working like a full-fledged member of your team. You can assign it tasks like code reviews, writing tests, fixing bugs, or even implementing full specs. It can also collaborate with other agents to tackle more complex challenges during development and production. With built-in audit logs and branch protections, every proposed change is reviewed before it ships. Copilot is your newest teammate—taking on the tedious work so you can focus on what really moves the needle.
- New app modernization capabilities: Shipping to production isn’t the finish line—and maintaining legacy code shouldn’t slow you down. GitHub Copilot can now help you modernize your stack by handling code assessments, dependency updates, and remediation across your legacy Java and .NET apps, and mainframe modernization is coming soon. It generates and executes update plans automatically, while giving you full visibility, control, and clear summary of changes. The result? More secure, maintainable, and cost-efficient apps. Turn the tables—so you’re not crushed by technical debt, you’re crushing it. When you’re not stuck cleaning up the past, you clear the path for real innovation—and finally make space to build what’s next.
- New Azure Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Agent: You build—we’ve got your back when things go bump in the night. The new SRE Agent for Azure frees developers from the constant stress of late-night alerts by monitoring production systems around the clock, responding to incidents in real time, and autonomously troubleshooting issues as they arise. It continuously tracks health and performance across Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure App Service, serverless, and database environments—drawing on the deep knowledge we’ve built operating Azure-based services at global scale. The agent helps you resolve problems fast by guiding through the root cause analysis interactively or even resolving them autonomously. Best of all, when remediation actions are taken or repair items are identified, they’re logged as GitHub issues so your team can follow through to close the loop. With faster recovery, fewer wake-up calls, and systems that know how to self-heal, your apps stay resilient—and your team stays rested, clear-headed, and ready to build what’s next.
Beyond the new agentic capabilities that we are announcing, we’re also releasing GitHub Models to make building AI apps even easier. If GitHub Copilot changed how we write code, Azure AI Foundry is changing what we can build. And now, that power is available directly in your GitHub workflow. With a new native integration, you can experiment with cutting-edge models from OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Mistal, Cohere, and more—right from GitHub. Compare performance and price side by side, choose the best fit for your app or agent, swap models with each using a simple, unified API, and even invoke a model or agent from a GitHub Action to streamline the offline evaluation process or even just to summarize your open issues. And with built-in enterprise guardrails, your model choices stay secure, responsible, and aligned with your team’s policies.
Let’s step into a day in the life of a developer where agents do more than assist—they step in, act fast, and keep things running—no matter the hour.
One more thing that will change the game
As GitHub Copilot has evolved in Visual Studio Code, AI has become a core part of the developer experience—powering everything from testing to security. We’re taking the next step in our open-source journey: Microsoft is open-sourcing GitHub Copilot in VS Code. The AI-powered capabilities from the GitHub Copilot extensions will now be part of the same open-source repository that drives the world’s most popular development tool. This reflects our commitment to transparency, community-driven innovation, and giving developers a greater voice in shaping the future of AI-assisted development.
We believe this new era of software development—powered by agents—will be as transformative as the shift to the cloud. It removes friction, reduces complexity, and rewrites the cost structure that has held teams back for decades. But maybe most importantly, it brings something back that we don’t talk about enough: joy. When we clear the backlog, offload the mundane, and focus on what we truly love to build, we don’t just speed up—we unlock the future we’ve been waiting to create.
Join us at Microsoft Build from May 19 to 22, 2025, and see the latest on these announcements
- BRK100: Reimagining Software Development and DevOps with Agentic AI
- BRK113: The Agent Awakens: Collaborative Development with GitHub Copilot
- BRK118: Accelerate Azure Development with GitHub Copilot, VS Code & AI
- BRK131: Java App Modernization Simplified with AI
- BRK102: Agent Mode in Action: AI Coding with Vibe and Spec-Driven Flows
- BRK101: The Future of .NET App Modernization Streamlined with AI
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