Microsoft has laid out a new vision for software work that puts helpful agents at each step, from first commit to on-call duty. The company calls the approach “agentic DevOps,” and it relies on new modes inside GitHub Copilot that can read, write, and test code while staying in the editor a team uses.
“Agentic DevOps will help you build faster, crush your backlog, cancel tech debt, secure your apps, and keep it all running in production,” said Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub. Copilot’s agents act like teammates who never clock out, yet ask for a human thumbs-up before any change ships.
The first piece is Agent mode, now in preview for Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Eclipse, and Xcode. A single prompt lets a developer scan a whole project, rewrite files, add tests, or suggest terminal commands. The agent can also run the tests it writes, then loop back if something fails, trimming the time that usually disappears into manual rework.
New coding agent joins the team
A second helper, simply called the coding agent, acts as a peer reviewer and bug fixer. Teams can hand it a pull request, a test plan, or even a full product spec. It cooperates with other Copilot agents, and every action lands in an audit log so teams can see what changed and why. GitHub says branch protection rules stay in place, so the bot cannot merge code without human review.
“We built the coding agent to take on chores that pull people away from design thinking,” said Amanda Silver, Microsoft corporate vice president for developer tools.
Copilot also learns old tricks. New modernization tools scan Java, .NET, and soon mainframe workloads, then draft an update plan, apply dependency patches, and present a clear summary. Developers can run the fixes or tweak them first, keeping control while avoiding days of file-by-file editing.
Azure SRE agent watches production
Work does not stop after deployment, so Microsoft added an Azure Site Reliability Engineering agent. The service watches Kubernetes, App Service, serverless, and database resources, steps in when an alert fires, and either guides the on-call engineer or runs a script on its own. Every action opens a GitHub issue, which keeps the cycle visible from code to production and back again.
Agent mode and the coding agent are in limited preview, with wider release slated for later this year. The app-modernization tools are part of GitHub Advanced Security, while the Azure SRE agent will reach select customers in the next few months. Microsoft said pricing will follow the existing Copilot business model, though it did not share numbers.
Taken together, the new agents show how Microsoft hopes to lower the routine work that fills a developer’s week. With agents handling tests, patches, and overnight pages, teams can put more time into design and the next set of features.
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