The AI game is evolving quickly with GitHub Copilot leading the charge for those working there. Third-party model support, agent mode quickly becoming smart, produtive, and overall valuable. However, what about the code quality? How can we work together to make things work perfectly in harmony? Lets explore a bit about Agent mode and Code Review and see what happens when we pair them together.
What is GitHub Copilot Agent?
This may seem trivial at this point, but for the purposes of this article, when we talk about GitHub Copilot Agent, we mean the Agentic worker on GitHub.com. The ability to take an Issue or other ad-hoc request and assign it to Copilot for resolution.
Once assigned, the Agent will review the request, your code base, any provided instructions and work to complete the task at hand. The success of this process continues to improve rapidly, but we can achieve more.
What is GitHub Copilot Code Review?
Again, for many, this is old news, but to set the record straight, this is the ability within GitHub to request Copilot to complete a review on a Pull Request. Typically utilized when having AI review your own submissions, but in this post, we explore using it a bit differently, as a secondary double check against the Agent.
Copilot Code Review has proven invaluable for day-to-day development. As a review agent, it pays special attention to consistency, adherence to acceptance criteria documented within the issues, and other true review-level items.
Combining These Together
Over the past few months, I've been experimenting with a process flow that roughly looksl ike the following:
- Document an issue (task) that needs to be completed
- Assign to Copilot Agent for completion
- When Copilot requests my request, request Copilot Code Review to do its thing
- Manually review
What I have found is that by following this process, I've reduced my review time by more than 45%, as many critical items that honestly I may have missed on my own were properly identified and eventually resolved by the agents!
Diving Deeper
Here is a recent video that I recorded for The Tech Vault that explores this functionality in detail!
Have you had a good experience? Or Bad? I'd love to hear more below!