AI Coding & Developer Tools

What Happened GitHub has outlined four ways to give Copilot codebase context: repository-wide custom instructions, file-specific instructions, reusable agent skills, and custom agents for broader tasks. MCP servers can connect Copilot to external tools; a Playwright server, for example, can let it test an application in a browser [1]. Separately, GitHub has introduced push attribution…

What Happened GitHub’s October 5 Copilot release made Claude Haiku 5.5 available to Pro, Pro+, Max, Business, and Enterprise users. Local sandboxing is now generally available at no extra cost in Copilot CLI, the Copilot app, and VS Code Agent Host sessions. It limits agent access to files, networks, and credentials. The Copilot app also…

What Happened GitHub added controls that let organization owners charge Copilot code reviews requested by licensed members to the repository-owning organization rather than to members’ Copilot quotas. This requires AI Credits paid usage; member billing remains the default. Owners and repository admins can also require reviewers to use a Copilot license issued by their organization…

What Happened GitHub made three repository workflow changes: users with triage, write, maintain or admin roles can now archive and unarchive pull requests; maintainers can count draft pull requests toward per-user limits; and screen readers can navigate several GitHub timelines as lists. Archiving closes a pull request, makes it read-only and hides it from public…

What Happened GitHub Copilot added Claude Haiku 5.5 for fast, high-volume coding work across supported interfaces, with a gradual rollout and usage billed at provider list pricing. Copilot CLI can now discover compatible models running in local Ollama, but developers must explicitly add a discovered model to their session. Local sandboxing is generally available in…

What Happened GitHub is redesigning its Git infrastructure for repositories where developers and agents work concurrently. Monthly Git events more than doubled between September 2025 and August 2026, reaching 473.3 billion. Its proposed architecture coordinates reference updates while parallelizing other push work, moves maintenance off the serving path, and separates compute from durable storage. GitHub…

What Happened ReviewBench released a public research preview for evaluating AI code reviewers offline. It contains 219 public pull requests from 187 repositories across 19 languages, selected after an analysis of 103.9 million GitHub pull requests. Its reference findings combine human reviews, author follow-up commits, static tools, and LLM analysis; independent senior engineers agreed with…

What Happened GitHub completed its rollout of stateless GitHub App installation tokens. Newly minted tokens now default to the ghs_APPID_JWT format and are about 520 characters long, up from roughly 40. Repository scoping, permissions, one-hour expiration, and the REST API endpoint are unchanged. GitHub plans to deprecate the temporary X-GitHub-Stateless-S2S-Token header on November 30, 2026.…

What Happened GitHub added REST and GraphQL support for requesting Copilot code reviews, including a per-request effort setting. Balanced became the default effort level on September 28 for new and existing repositories and organizations; explicit Lite selections remain in place. Settings can be configured at enterprise, organization, repository, and personal levels, with lower levels able…

What Happened GitHub launched self-serve trials of GitHub Advanced Security for GitHub Team customers, allowing evaluation of GitHub Code Security and GitHub Secret Protection from org Overview, Licensing, or Risk Assessment pages [3]. GitHub released HydraFusion as a research preview in Visual Studio Code (v1.140+ / Insiders) and the GitHub Copilot…

Findings [1] 2026-09-29 Repository custom runner settings for Dependabot As a repository administrator, you can now configure the runner type, optional custom label, and optional runner group for Dependabot version and security updates. This extends the runner configuration already available at the organization level, giving you more control over where each repository’s Dependabot jobs…