Today I experienced something I will remember for the rest of my software career.
It’s GitHub’s new Assign bug to Copilot feature. It feels like futuristic magic. It lets you assign opened issues on your GitHub repo to an AI agent to fix them:
Today, I tried it on a real project at work: Microsoft’s PWABuilder repo. We have about 140 opened issues in our backlog, many of them are due to accessibility issues.
I’m a developer and I enjoy writing code. But fixing accessibility bugs isn’t exactly exciting work. I had seen this assign-bug-to-Copilot demoed at Build a few weeks ago and was eager to try it out. This seemed like a good opportunity.
I found a good issue: PWABuilder doesn’t adapt properly at 400% zoom. Like it says on the tin, if you zoom your browser to 400%, my app’s UI starts overlapping. Can Copilot fix it?
I assigned the issue to Copilot:
Copilot immediately created a draft PR, saying it’s forming a plan to fix the issue.
Within 30 minutes, Copilot pushed 2 commits, adding about 200 lines of CSS.
The code it wrote, by the way, fits into our architecture. We use standards-based Web Components in PWABuilder, and we use CSS media queries to define different layouts for the UI. Copilot’s PR created a new media query helper for extra small screens (< 320px width, effective size at 400% zoom) and updated our pages to use that.
Copilot filled out the PR’s description with a detailed list of the changes it made and why. It then requested my review.
The code looked good. But I checked out the branch it created and ran it locally. Woops, there’s still a problem with the app header. I told Copilot about it in the PR:
Within 30 seconds, Copilot had a fix ready:
I tried out the updated code:
So, that went really well.
But, I’ve got like dozens of accessibility bugs, and over a hundred issues opened in the backlog. How about I just assign a bunch of them to Copilot? I told my team,
I assigned a bunch of opened issues to Copilot. Within minutes, I had dozens of PRs opened, with Copilot showing the progress of each one:
Copilot is a great multitasker. 🙂 He is working on dozens of PRs simultaneously.
Within about 30 minutes, I’ve got 13 PRs ready for review.
Magic. I’m living in the future.
I’m not naive in saying that. I heavily use Copilot Agent in VSCode in my day-to-day work. I’ve watched — with slight horror and great amusement — AI agents create software out of thin air via vibe coding. I’m aware of what’s possible.
Yet, having AI do all the work on a real project, on a real bug, without much intervention from humans? And the AI agent working on many bugs and PRs concurrently? Well, that feels magical.
It’s something I’ll remember for the rest of my career. A new era. Is it a bell toll for white collar tech jobs or a boon for productivity? This remains to be seen.