Tracking Copilot's sessions

You can use the Agents page and session logs to track Copilot's progress and understand its approach.

Who can use this feature?

Copilot coding agent is available with the GitHub Copilot Pro, GitHub Copilot Pro+, GitHub Copilot Business and GitHub Copilot Enterprise plans. Access for Copilot trials is coming soon. The agent is available in all repositories, except where it has been explicitly disabled and repositories owned by managed user accounts.
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In this article

Note

Copilot coding agent is in public preview and subject to change. During the preview, use of the feature is subject to GitHub Pre-release License Terms.

Introduction

After you give Copilot a task, it works autonomously in the background to complete it. See About assigning tasks to Copilot.

The Agents page provides an overview of your agent sessions across repositories. From this page, you can kick off new tasks and track Copilot's progress.

During or after an agent session, you can inspect the session logs to understand Copilot's approach to your problem.

Tracking agent sessions from the Agents page

You can see a list of your running and past agent sessions on the Agents page at github.com/copilot/agents.

You can also reach this page by clicking the button next to the search bar on any page on GitHub, then selecting Agents from the sidebar.

Screenshot of the Agents page with several sessions, including one currently in progress.

For each session listed below the prompt field, you can see its status at a glance, or click on it to navigate to the linked pull request.

You can also start new agent sessions from this page. See Asking Copilot to create a pull request.

Using the session logs to understand Copilot's approach

You can dive into Copilot's session logs to understand how it approached your task.

To view the session logs, click View session in the pull request timeline.

Screenshot of a section of a pull request with the 'View session' button highlighted.

In the session logs, you can see Copilot's internal monologue and the tools it used to understand your repository, make changes and validate its work.

Note

Copilot has its own development environment, including the ability to run automated tests and linters, to validate its changes before it pushes.

Stopping a Copilot session

You can stop Copilot from continuing to work on a task by clicking Stop session in the session log viewer.

Screenshot of the log viewer with the 'Stop session' button highlighted.

Reasons you might want to stop a session include:

  • Copilot appears to be going in a wrong direction, and you want to stop it and give it more clarity.
  • You made a mistake in your description of the required work, and you've decided to start over.
  • You've realized that the change you asked for doesn't need to be made, so you want to stop Copilot from doing any more work on it.

Further reading