Agentic Capabilities Go GA

Custom agents, sub-agents, and plan agent are now generally available in GitHub Copilot for JetBrains IDEs. These capabilities allow developers to tailor Copilot to their workflows and collaborate with specialized agents directly within their IDE, making it easier to automate complex development tasks.

New Features and Improvements

Agent Hooks in Preview: Agent hooks are available in public preview, allowing you to run custom commands at key points during agent sessions. Supported events include userPromptSubmitted, preToolUse, postToolUse, and errorOccurred. This gives you the ability to automate workflows, enforce policies, and integrate with external tools while maintaining control over agent behavior.

MCP Auto-Approve: You can now configure auto-approve for MCP at both the server and tool level, reducing manual approvals during agent sessions. Configure this in Settings > GitHub Copilot > Chat > MCP Server and Tool Auto-approve Configuration.

Enhanced Customization: New support for AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md instruction files makes it easier to tailor Copilot's behavior to your project's conventions. Copilot automatically discovers and loads these files during agent workflows. You can also use the new /memory slash command for quick access to instruction file settings.

Model Selection and Reasoning

Auto Model Selection GA: Auto model selection is now generally available for all Copilot plans, allowing Copilot to automatically choose the best model based on real-time availability and performance without manual switching.

Thinking Panel: A dedicated thinking panel for extended-reasoning models (like Codex) provides visibility into the model's reasoning process with configurable Anthropic thinking budgets. A new context window usage indicator shows how much context is being used during conversations.

Quality and UX Enhancements

The update includes improved sign-in experience with automatic chat panel opening, smoother GitHub Enterprise login flow with device code prioritization, more responsive chat panel layout, and cleaner context/file attachment handling. Several stability improvements address terminal output reading, file update application, and UI inconsistencies. Note that Edit mode has been deprecated in the chat mode dropdown.

The update also introduces improved Windows ARM platform support and refined triggering behavior for various UI elements.