Putting GitHub’s New AI Agent to the Test

GitHub has been on a tear recently, adding a lot of new features in a short amount of time. It’s exciting to see the platform evolve so quickly, especially with its deeper integration of AI.

One of the newer features that caught my eye is Agent tasks. The core idea is that these tasks can run in the background without us having to do anything on our local machines. I decided to try out a couple of these new automated features to see how they hold up in a real-world workflow.

AI-Powered Task Completion

Probably the most obvious of these new agent tasks is the ability to assign an issue directly to GitHub Copilot. You can write up a task, assign it to the AI, and it will attempt to complete the work and submit a pull request on its own.

To test this, I created a fairly simple task to add a new page to an existing portal in one of our projects. I wrote up a good task description, outlining the requirements clearly, and assigned it.

So, how did it do?

It worked. The agent generated a PR that was ready for me to review, which I eventually merged to deploy the new page into the system. The impressive part is that I never had to do any of the actual coding work myself.

However, my main reservation is the speed. The task took about 15 minutes to complete. For a simple page like this, I could have generated the same code using Cursor or Claude in less than a minute. While I doubt it could handle anything very complicated right now, it was successful for a very simple PR.

Another one of these agent features is the ability to initialize a repository for you using a prompt. You get 500 characters to describe how you want the repository prepped, and the AI takes a first pass at it for you.

With a 500-character limit, you obviously can’t have it create a full-blown application, but it can give you a nice head start.

I recently used this to create a new repository that needed many folders, with each folder containing a set of slides. I gave it my prompt, and GitHub did a pretty good job. It created the folder structure I asked for and even generated some starter slides for me.

The Future is Automated

These advancements are only going to get better. It’s clear that a lot of the boilerplate or repetitive tasks we currently handle will soon be managed by AI.

While features like these might seem small now, they point toward a future where we can offload more of the setup and routine coding. This allows us, as developers, to focus on the more complex and creative problems—the fun stuff.

Have you tried out GitHub’s agent tasks yet? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

Chad Michel Chief Technology Officer

Chad is a lifelong Nebraskan. He grew up in rural Nebraska and now lives in Lincoln. Chad and his wife have a son and daughter.

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