GitHub published its weekly Copilot update on November 6, 2026, covering the week of November 2 — right after a busy week in which Copilot landed natively in Xcode and in JetBrains Air’s cloud agent sessions. Two additions matter directly for teams industrializing coding agents on their repositories: Agent Merge, which merges a pull request as soon as it is ready, and assisted approval, which lets Copilot handle some tool-authorization decisions on its own. The rest of the release covers VS Code 1.145, the Copilot CLI settings panel, and session management in the Copilot app.
Agent Merge: merging as soon as a pull request is ready
Agent Merge is turned on directly from a pull request. Once enabled, Copilot merges the pull request as soon as required checks and branch protection rules are satisfied — a point that matters for teams that already had to adapt their GitHub Actions workflows to the default blocking of pull_request_target. It stays paused while a check or rule is still pending, which avoids premature merges on repositories with strict review requirements. The interface also lets you track review status, request additional reviewers, and discuss or quote a selected comment directly with Copilot.
Assisted approval: delegating some decisions, not all
Assisted approval lets you give Copilot guidance on which tool requests it can approve on its own, without asking every time. The feature is strictly opt-in and applies only to local sessions, which keeps its scope to developer workstations rather than cloud runs.
Worth noting: assisted approval is opt-in, but it shifts part of the security decision from the moment of the request to the moment of configuration. A loosely written instruction can approve more than intended, so it deserves the same scrutiny as any other permission rule, not a one-time setup that gets forgotten.
What VS Code 1.145 adds on its own
| Feature | Status | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Chat view modes | Experimental | Collapse or expand reasoning and tool calls without starting a new conversation |
| Remote apps and canvases | Preview | Check an agent’s work on another machine from the Agents window |
| Local automations | Available | Trigger agents on a cron expression or a custom workspace agent |
| Attachments | Available | Add screenshots and mockups via Add Context > Files |
A scheduled local automation looks like this, using a standard cron expression to re-run a nightly review agent:
name: nightly-audit
on:
schedule:
cron: "0 2 * * *"
agent: workspace
task: >
Review dependencies changed during the day
and flag any untested major upgrade.
Agent Merge and assisted approval share the same logic: cut the number of human round-trips without removing the checkpoint that precedes a merge or a tool run.
The rest of the week: automations and a unified settings panel
In Copilot CLI, the /settings command now opens a single, searchable dashboard for extensions, MCP servers, and other settings, replacing a scattered set of subcommands — in the same spirit as the other command-line tools for web development that now group their settings in one place. In the Copilot app, dropping a file onto “New” starts a session directly, CSV and TSV files open as tables, and pinned sessions whose pull requests have merged can be archived in bulk.
Why this gradual automation matters
Each of these features is minor on its own. Together, they shift the balance toward agents that less often wait for an explicit human sign-off, provided the upstream automated checks — tests, branch rules, required reviews — are already solid. Teams without that foundation would do well to build it before turning on Agent Merge, rather than layering automation on top of a still-permissive validation pipeline.
Key takeaways
GitHub is adding two mechanisms to Copilot that cut human interruptions: automatic merging of a ready pull request, and assisted approval of tool requests in local sessions. Both stay narrow and optional, but they assume an already reliable verification pipeline, so the risk is reduced rather than relocated.
Agent Merge is the most interesting feature in this batch, provided it only gets turned on for repositories where the required checks actually cover what matters. On a repository with gaps in its CI, this automation will just merge, faster, things that should have been reviewed anyway — Simon Janvier.
Further reading: GitHub Copilot Weekly Releases — November 2 (GitHub Changelog).
