GitHub Copilot code review (Public Preview)

[Akash1134]

No more wait: Copilot code review is here 🚀

We’re thrilled to announce a major update to Copilot Code Review! All Copilot Individual, Copilot Business, and Copilot Enterprise subscribers can sign up for Copilot Code Review and will be automatically approved. 🎉

What’s New

• Review summary: Get detailed summaries that offer a clearer understanding of the changes made in your pull request.
• Smarter reviews: Our AI now leverages the latest models to provide more insightful feedback, identifying potential issues you might otherwise miss.

Automatic code reviews can be configured using repository rules, or you can ask Copilot for a review on demand. You can also jump into the new Copilot Workspace experience from your pull request context to refine and validate Copilot’s suggestions. Review your code in Visual Studio Code before pushing it to GitHub to keep your development process agile and efficient.

This update empowers developers to leverage the power of AI in everyday code reviews, allowing you to focus on solving complex challenges and innovating faster.

We can’t wait for you to try out these improvements. ⏭️

To learn more about Copilot Code Review, check out the docs page. To ask questions or share feedback, comment below 👇 🚀

[bigint]

How can I get access for this feature? Already applied to waitlist 🤞🏼

Our repo is huge and need this for sure 🙇🏼

https://github.com/heyxyz/hey

[timrogers]

@frkhol Sure! Would you be able to email me at the @github.com email address on my profile? I'd just like to get connected with one of your company administrators before we turn it on.

[makskustomer]

@timrogers Ive been signed up for waitlist since day 1 and our org uses copilot and heavily is looking to adopt AI everywhere and to improve code quality. We are also involved in alot of other feature requests, I see the public preview options to enable this but it doesnt seem to work. Is there a feature flag that just needs to be toggled?

[apdev-JulienBreton]

Hey @timrogers Hi is it possible to get an update on waitlist ? My devs ask me everyday when we get access =)

thx

[baptLesta]

Hey @timrogers Do you know where my company Zeffy is on the waiting list, we are waiting for this for weeks now and we are super excited about it 😃

[DanielHC16]

Same!

[alazreq]

Does help find the error in line 5?

[fnesveda]

Hey! When you sign up for the waitlist and get approved, is Copilot Code review available for your whole organization, or just for your individual account? And if only the individual account, is it possible to sign up the whole organization to the waitlist?

[tallior]

same here. any success in getting it to work @makskustomer ?

[makskustomer]

I now have access after todays announcement.

[christian-andersson]

got my request approved for my organisation, and we are paying customers, but code review is still not available for me, is ther anyone from github here actually reading this? there are plenty more in my situation..

[DanielHC16]

Same here

[redveronika]

the same for my organization

[malytskyybabtec]

this is very cool and could be a serious performance booster within our enterprise subscription on many levels! My am really excited about the quality of reviews in my tests 👍 These things we need to roll out deep integration into our processes:

• please add support for Visual Studio plugin
• please add integration into AzureDevOps services

Thank you!

[williamjamir]

Regarding VS Code:

• This is the most essential feature for me. I want to receive comments and suggestions locally before I open a pull request.
• Within VS code, I tried using the "Copilot Code Review" button on the source control tab, but it usually gives "no suggestions to give" for the 17 files I've changed.
• If I execute multiple times (to overcome the previous issue), I can get comments, but they are always on the latest file I've opened (in the staged files).
• However, if I go into some of these files, select the whole code, and click "Review using Copilot," I receive at least five comments.

As a suggestion and future improvements for the VS Code:

• Please add a function to analyze code that has already been committed or pushed, allowing it to "analyze everything between HEAD and some branch."

Regarding the UI:

• I still need to assign the Copilot user to my pull request, but I likely won't, as I anticipate too much unnecessary noise.
• My excitation is about noise comments and having to delete them manually in case they are irrelevant.

Suggestion for UI:

• It would be perfect if the "Chat with Copilot" had some "shortcuts" or "default prompts" for code review, code simplification, and so on available straight as comments on the chat rather than comments on the PR directly.

[aspearman]

It looks like it doesn’t support reviewing my *.swift files, so I can’t use it for my indie iOS app PRs. Is that right?

[aspearman]

Docs here show swift isn't supported. Supported langs:

C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Markdown, Python, Ruby, TypeScript

Definitely would like wider language support! The indie app community in particular is big. Swift and Kotlin support would be great.

[beingminimal]

@Akash1134 We follow trunk based development and so we don't create PRs. So we would like to have code review suggestions based on staged commit before we push code to repo.
And also code review comments in respect of the whole repo code in the main branch also.
Is this already supported?

[maciejbrzezinski]

Is there a timeframe for when Dart and PHP will be supported?

[rymnc]

wen Rust?

[PETAPAMENMESJJ]

I like this fast advancement 💚

[magnesj]

I would like to have this feature for C++. When can we expect C++ to be supported?

It would be useful to have a roadmap for planned language support.

[xmatthias]

Overall, i found the review to be okish, and it did highlight a point i didn't consider before.

Now the problem is - it finds this in one occurance, but that same file had the same exact access problem twice - which copilot somehow overlooked.
Were i not reviewing my own PR and knowing what i'm doing (or rely on copilot too much) - this would mean i'll be missing a key problem.

---

I also find the review comment of "Evaluated as low risk" a bit odd - not necessarily the comment, but that it suggests that it skipped review of these files completely.
This may be fine for a .md file (it's documentation after all) - maybe even for tests (tests can still contain slight bugs causing test flakyness).

But in my case, it skipped 2 key (key, as in important / central to the project) .py files with "Evaluated as low risk" - skipping review completely.
I suspect the files are too big for copilot to review (both skipped files are over 1000 lines) - but that shouldn't mean they're "low risk" - rather "high risk but context window exceeded".
Being honest here (couldn't analyze) would be WAY better than "Evaluated as low risk" - which is either a false errormessage - or a completely failed "risk analysis".

[talkingtoaj]

I received the email saying I have been granted access to "GitHub Copilot code review", but for my projects Copilot does not appear as a reviewer option on my Pull requests, nor as an option on rulesets for automatic review.

Did the email perhaps skip a step about something I needed to first do to activate Copilot code reviewer?

[ConnorSinnott]

Same here! Very excited for this feature, but having received the email saying our org has been granted access, Copilot does not appear as a reviewer options and the ruleset option did nothing. I was worried we missed something in settings but @mjfpalmer post makes me think we didn't.

[eshwer]

If you're still having issues and have not already contacted support, please respond with your org name and a user name it's supposed to work for. We've been having some caching issues which is why some folks in the thread are eventually getting access.

[watts-agb]

@eshwer
We're in the same situation, received the e-mail stating it should available but does not appear when creating a PR in a repo.
Did validate that preview-features is enabled.

org name: WattsSolutions
user name: watts-agb

[dashorst]

@eshwer We are in the preview, but have no option to select Copilot as a reviewer even though we've dotted all the I's.

org name: topicusonderwijs
username: dashorst

[keren-cw]

@eshwer we are having this issue.
org name: cloudwalk
user: keren-cw

[cookieopjax]

In VS Code, I have made changes to many files, but I only ever receive suggestions for one file's modifications.

[ffxsam]

It would be nice to see the review guidelines feature open to all paid users, not just Enterprise. This is the feature we were looking forward to the most.

[HotCakeX]

Hello,
GitHub Copilot Code review suggests old code and it doesn't recognize new syntax. I provided an example below. I think the data set it was trained on is old? It's like it has no idea about existence of .NET 8/.NET 9

For instance, it thinks this code which is mine, is not correct

[.. ids.Select(id => id.ToLowerInvariant())]

and instead tells me to use this

ids.Select(id => id.ToLowerInvariant()).ToArray();

but the syntax i used is totally correct and has been available for over a year in .NET/C#.

[iSerter]

I, too, get the 403 error on VS Code.
on Github.com, I don't have the Copilot option for PR reviewers at all.

[eshwer]

Is this still the case?

[pavel-bstk]

@eshwer still the case for me, getting the same error: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/141896#discussioncomment-12363268

[eshwer]

403 is Unauthorized, so it is possible you or whoever is reporting might not have the proper license/access.

[pavel-bstk]

@eshwer What level of access do I need to use Copilot Code Review in VS Code, given that all other Copilot features work fine and the review button is visible in the UI?

[pavel-bstk]

@eshwer Also, Copilot is not appearing as a reviewer on GitGub for me :(

[Axosoft-Ashley]

Hi! I would like to assign Copilot as a reviewer programmically. i attemped with the requested_reviewers api

If i assign a reviewer who is not a collaborator via api i get a 422 unprocessable entity

but if i assign Copilot or copilot as a reviewer i get a 201 created but the reviewer isnt added.

[jcleigh]

When I was experimenting with this, I had the same result. I believe it is because Copilot is a GitHub app, not a user.

[makskustomer]

It looks like copilot pr preview has disappeared from my ruleset and is inconsistently appearing on new prs. Branches and repos match and no other changes were made. Im our org admin. Anyone else?

[eshwer]

The copilot reviewer only appears for PRs authored by someone with a copilot license, is that the case?

[FlowFan]

Any plans to support JetBrains IDE？

[ro-savage]

Same issue as everyone else. Accepted 2 days ago.

Preview features enabled

Not option to choose Copilot.

Organisation is https://github.com/Runn-Fast/

Thanks @eshwer

[mostafasoufi]

Same issue here. Copilot is not showing-up. (using the free version and the tested in this PR wp-statistics/wp-statistics#718)

[eshwer]

Asked internally

[eshwer]

Onboarded Runn-Fast,
wp-statistics is not on our waitlist. @mostafasoufi , you need to first join the public preview waitlist.

[mostafasoufi]

I already joined the whitelist, but when I tried again, I received the error: 'Member has already signed up for the waitlist.

[mighty-peach]

Hey, all is great but for tuning the review tool it would work great to provide "instructions" and "rules" for copilot in some file in repository, as if you use other AI tools, you usually have documentation in repository and duplicate it in GH settings is not convenient

[eshwer]

@ChrisWiles do you want those instructions specific to Copilot Code Reviews?

[ChrisWiles]

Yes docs for the llm

[eshwer]

I guess put in other words, should these instructions also apply to autocomplete and copilot chat?

[ChrisWiles]

No, they’d be different sets of instructions.

You’d need separate docs for code review since those rules wouldn’t necessarily apply to code generation—though there’d be some overlap.

Chat and autocomplete might be able to share some rules.

You might want to go with something like:

/copilotRules  
 ├── codeReview.md  
 ├── codeCompletion.md  

[ChrisWiles]

There can be multiple copilotRules directories.

For example, the one at the root would apply to all files, but if you have one deeper, like:

src/screens/myNewFeature/copilotRules

Then, any code inside myNewFeature would follow both the root-level rules and the more specific feature-level rules.

[tomcsu]

Reviewer "Copilot" is not showing-up for an organization member with Copilot license, works for other members. Anyone having this issue?

[bradleybluebean]

@althq-org is the org and I believe I should be able to see Copilot under Reviewers (I have access to all the other Copilot features).
Thanks

[ChrisWiles]

@eshwer AgoraSystems is the org name

[tomcsu]

UPDATE: thanks to the prompt response from Github Support, my issue got resolved with a backend service refresh for the affected user.

[armg-kyosuke-takayama]

Same here.
Our org name is armg.

[eshwer]

onboarded althq-org, Allera-Technologies

[cquanu]

Copilot should react to my comments or reply me if I seek clarification

[eshwer]

Tell me more, like you would want to have a conversation?

[ktjn]

Also not seeing "copilot" as a reviewer after receiving access a few days ago. Organisation https://github.com/nordicfactory

[nickborromeo]

This looked to be a cache issue where your setting for beta features was cached to false. We refreshed this and should work for you now 🤞

[ktjn]

Always the cache. Thanks, now it's enabled.

[matt-at-allera]

+1 not seeing "copilot" as a reviewer. I received access yesterday. Organization is https://github.com/Allera-Technologies. I have opted the organization into the preview feature.

[lukebowerman]

Seeing this issue as well (opted into the preview March 1st)

[eshwer]

If you have not yet filed a support ticket, please consider doing so.

[eshwer]

I'm seeing internally Allera is enabled

[matt-at-allera]

@eshwer it's working now, thank you! Probably a cache refresh

[krymtkts]

I tried it with TypeScript and Python, and it works great. Thank you.
Also, as others have mentioned, I would like to see the support for languages expanded.
It would be great if PHP, Kotlin, Swift, or SQL were added.
If there is a roadmap for supported languages, I would be interested to know about it.

[trietbui-zalora]

Yeah, I was surprised it doesn't support Kotlin. That's why I always see: "Copilot reviewed XX out of XX changed files in this pull request and generated no comments."

[eshwer]

This is on our radar and we hope to prioritize shortly after GA.

[lukebowerman]

Same as others here we got email that our organization was enabled (and have "Preview features" enabled) but no seeing copilot reviewer option. Organization is exploreomni

[eshwer]

If you have not yet filed a support ticket, please consider doing so.

[ChrisWiles]

got email that our organization was enabled (and have "Preview features" enabled) but no seeing copilot reviewer option. Organization is AgoraSystems

[eshwer]

If you have not yet filed a support ticket, please consider doing so.

[eshwer]

I see internally AgoraSystems is enabled

[ChrisWiles]

Ok, I created a ticket. I am unable to see it on any PR. I will ask my coworkers as well

[dashorst]

We are in the preview (got the email to prove it), but have no option to select Copilot as a reviewer even though we've dotted all the I's (enabled the preview features). My guess is were are also in the cache limbo. Or DNS, it's always DNS.

org name: topicusonderwijs
username: dashorst

[eshwer]

If you haven't filed a support ticket yet, I'd suggest starting there! thanks!

[dashorst]

To follow up on status (just an FYI) Github Support has reset the cache, but for our organization it didn't result in a working code review preview. I've updated the support ticket with my findings and settings/evidence and am awaiting their response.

[redveronika]

The same thing with us. Cache reset didn't help

[micahdasMA]

We are successfully using Copilot as a PR reviewer and have created a ruleset to automatically request it on new PRs.

This however has broken our Scheduled Reminder that sends a daily slack message for PRs that need to be reviewed, as now Copilot is a pending reviewer and the reminder will not alert for PRs that already have a pending review.

Is there any way to exclude Copilot reviews from counting in this reminder?