GitHub Brings Copilot Agents to Slack and Teams

GitHub has launched a public preview of its Copilot agent inside Slack and Microsoft Teams for users on paid plans. By mentioning @GitHub in a chat thread, developers can initiate a multiplayer agent session. This shared agent can read the surrounding conversation, triage bug reports, run code in a secure cloud sandbox, and open pull requests. Because the session is visible to everyone in the channel, team members can collectively steer the agent's work during a meeting, and administrators can mandate human approval before any Copilot-authored pull request is merged.

Beyond chat platforms, GitHub introduced a generally available Customize tab in the Copilot desktop app to centralize Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, plugins, skills, and canvases, including a featured Azure DevOps integration. Meanwhile, the Copilot CLI received a new Sessions sidebar that lets developers run multiple agent conversations simultaneously, using keyboard shortcuts like 'n' to open a new session and 'x' to close one. The CLI update also introduces two experimental commands: /worktree, which creates an isolated workspace to explore changes, and /rewind, which restores files to a previous state without relying on Git.

To power these workflows, GitHub has made three new models generally available across the Copilot app, CLI, and VS Code: Gemini 3.7 Flash, MAI-Code-1.1-Flash, and Kimi K3, an open-weight model hosted by Fireworks AI. These fast, cost-effective models are optimized for frequent tool calls. Finally, VS Code dictation has transitioned to a privacy-focused, multilingual on-device model. This local model automatically detects the spoken language, allowing developers to dictate prompts and code comments securely without sending audio data off their machines.