// Developer Experience

The Copilot coding agent can be triggered directly from a Copilot Chat session in Visual Studio Code, not just from GitHub Issues. This video shows how to use the GitHub chat participant in ask mode to delegate an ad-hoc refactoring task—standardizing naming conventions across the 'Copilot Airways' codebase—without interrupting your current workflow. Copilot outlines a plan for your approval, creates a pull request with documentation updates, runs linting and build checks in the background, and waits for the 'Approve and Run' gate before the final review.

Getting the best results from the GitHub Copilot coding agent requires deliberate setup across four areas. This video covers writing well-scoped GitHub Issues with clear acceptance criteria and file pointers, crafting Copilot custom instructions to enforce team conventions and development flow, configuring a consistent development environment using Copilot setup steps, and extending Copilot's toolset with Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers configured from repository settings.

GitHub Copilot coding agent lets you assign GitHub Issues to Copilot, which works asynchronously in the background to create and iterate on pull requests. This video walks through assigning a form input validation task on the 'Copilot Airways' demo app, watching Copilot form a plan, generate code, and run linters, builds, and tests to verify quality. It also covers the human-in-the-loop review experience—adding PR comments that Copilot acknowledges and acts on—plus the 'Approve and Run' gate that protects GitHub Actions execution.

In this stream, Chris builds a GitHub CLI extension (gh-demo) in Go from scratch using a spec-driven development approach with Copilot Agent Mode. Topics include bootstrapping a VS Code workspace with Copilot, test-driven development for a hydrate subcommand, and setting up GitHub Actions CI.

Chris explains what Model Context Protocol (MCP) is and demos the new GitHub MCP server alongside Copilot Agent Mode in VS Code. The stream covers creating repos and issues through MCP tools, then builds a strategy visualization app from a screenshot using agent mode, vision, and the Playwright and sequential thinking MCP servers.

This episode dives deep into GitHub Advanced Security's new standalone Secret Protection and Code Security products. Chris demos secret scanning, push protection, custom patterns, and the free secret risk assessment report, then shows off a GitHub-themed brick breaker game powered by real contribution graph data.

Chris live-codes a GitHub-themed brick breaker walkthrough using Copilot agent mode, demonstrating how prompt framing, context, and custom instructions shape AI-generated output.

Chris explores GitHub Models as an AI prototyping playground, demonstrates Copilot on the command line for learning Linux commands, and shows off a Cosmos DB-backed leaderboard for the OctoSnap game.

Chris introduces OctoSnap, a GitHub-themed memory card game built with Next.js, and dives deep into designing a scoring model with Copilot covering difficulty multipliers, time bonuses, and penalty mechanics.

Demonstrates GitHub Spark on mobile, building a podcast session timer app entirely through natural language prompts. The video covers iteratively adding timer controls (start, pause, reset), a reverse progress bar, a color-coded time-remaining indicator (green/amber/red), and AI-powered timer creation from a plain-language description—showcasing GitHub Spark's built-in LLM integration. It also demonstrates Spark's managed state storage and the share link for giving collaborators read or write access.