GitHub Copilot reaches JetBrains Air and Xcode in its November 2 weekly update

Two new homes for Copilot

As github.blog reported in its weekly release roundup, the biggest news is where Copilot now lives. It is available in JetBrains Air, and it can also be used inside the coding assistant built into Apple's Xcode editor.

In JetBrains Air, you can follow several agent sessions at once. An agent session is a task you hand to an AI helper, which then works on it step by step. Those tasks can run on your own machine inside your JetBrains editor, or in the cloud through Air Teams. Either way, GitHub says the work runs on your existing Copilot subscription, so there is no separate plan to buy.

The Xcode integration is a public preview, meaning anyone can try it but it is not final. It starts with Xcode 27.3 beta, so you need that pre-release version of Xcode to use it.

Less babysitting in the Copilot app

The standalone GitHub Copilot app gets the longest list of changes. The headline feature is Agent Merge. You switch it on from a pull request (a proposed change to a project's code), and Copilot merges the change once it is ready. It now stays switched on while required checks or rules are still pending, so you can set it early and move on.

You can also see where each reviewer stands, ask for more reviews, and select a piece of a comment to quote it or talk it over with Copilot.

Long conversations get some help too. Every AI chat has a limit on how much text it can hold at once. When you hit it, you can now shrink the conversation or look at what is using up the space, straight from the error message, instead of starting over.

Tidier sessions and files

Several changes are about housekeeping. You can start a session by dropping files onto the "New" entry in the sidebar. CSV and TSV files, which are plain-text spreadsheets, now open as tables with headers that stay in view as you scroll, and you can switch to the raw source.

• Archive pinned sessions whose pull requests have been merged or closed.
• Pin or unpin several sessions at once.
• Pull nested chats apart without losing the conversation.
• Save more than ten custom views in My Work.

There is also a new opt-in setting for personal instructions on assisted approval. It lets you tell Copilot which tool requests it may approve without asking you each time. It applies only to local sessions, not cloud ones.

Command line and VS Code changes

In Copilot CLI, the text-based version of the tool, typing /settings now opens a single dashboard. It covers plugins, MCP servers (connections that let an AI tool reach outside services) and other options, and it has search across all of them.

VS Code version 1.145 brings a handful of updates:

• Chat view modes (experimental): collapse or expand the agent's reasoning and tool calls without starting a new conversation.
• Remote previews: check an agent's work on another machine and preview remote apps in the Agents window, which is in preview. This needs remote browser support turned on in settings.
• Scheduled tasks: local automations now accept cron expressions, a compact way of writing a repeating schedule, and custom agents from your workspace.
• Outside files: bring screenshots, mockups and other files into chat without copying them into your workspace, using Add Context > Files. Cloud sessions accept only images.
• Long chats: past terminal output now appears as you expand it, rather than loading all at once.

What to make of it

This is a routine weekly roundup, and most of it is incremental. Taken together, though, the direction is clear. Copilot is becoming something that runs several tasks in parallel and needs tools to manage them, which explains the focus on archiving, pinning, approvals and merging.

The Xcode and JetBrains Air additions matter most for people who do not live in VS Code. The Xcode one comes with a caveat: it is a preview on a beta version of Xcode, so expect rough edges.

The approval and merge features also hand Copilot more independence. Both come with controls. Assisted approval is opt-in and local only, and Agent Merge waits for the checks and rules a project requires.