Copilot Coding Agent and the Future
Explore how the GitHub Copilot coding agent autonomously manages multi-file code refactoring tasks. Learn to delegate complex workflows like consolidating functions, running tests, and creating pull requests securely, boosting productivity and maintaining code integrity with AI assistance.
It’s Friday, 4:00 p.m. The office is quiet. You’re moments away from wrapping up a productive week. Just one last code push and you’re done. But then a message lands in your inbox:
“Hey, quick thing, can you clean up those
TODOcomments and consolidate the slug helpers before Monday?”
You blink.
It sounds simple. But when you check the codebase, you realize the scope: 73 TODO comments are scattered across 18 files. Worse, three different versions of a slugify function are duplicated in various corners of the repo. Some are in helpers.js, others in utility files: all slightly different. Imports need to be updated. The test suite will definitely need a rerun. The risk of introducing subtle bugs is high.
You’ve been here before. This kind of work isn’t challenging in a technical sense; it’s just tedious, repetitive, and easy to get wrong. Normally, you’d start combing through files manually, chasing down each helper, rewriting and reorganizing code until your weekend feels like a blur of commits and caffeine.
But not today. Today, you enable the Copilot agent mode.
You type:
Consolidate all slug helpers into slug_utils.js, update imports, and run tests.
On Monday morning, the first thing you see is a pull request written by the agent. All helper functions have been centralized into a single module. Every ...