GitHub Copilot code review now resolves its own comments after a fix

GitHub published a changelog entry on 11 September describing four changes to Copilot code review. Two are small workflow improvements, one expands what the review agent is allowed to do, and one changes how the model behind the default review effort is set up.

The two workflow changes

When a reviewer addresses a Copilot comment with a follow-up commit, Copilot now resolves the comment on its own during the re-review. Before this change, the comment stayed open until someone clicked resolve by hand, even when the diff clearly answered it, which filled the review with old, finished threads. GitHub also says that when a developer applies one of Copilot's suggested code fixes, the commit message is now written by Copilot from the change itself, instead of the generic auto-fill GitHub used before.

Broader tool access for the review agent

GitHub writes that the review agent "can now access the full set of shell tools from the Copilot SDK". In practice that means the agent can run builds, run the test suite, and execute scripts inside the review environment, so a review comment can refer to what actually happened when the code ran. GitHub does not explain the limits of the sandbox for review runs. Enterprise administrators already have controls for Copilot agent sandboxing in JetBrains as of the same weekly release, and the review agent uses the same permission model.

Ensemble analysis is now the default Lite behaviour

The larger change is in the model that runs the review. Copilot code review has a Lite effort level, which runs on every pull request by default, and a heavier Full effort level. GitHub has replaced the single-agent analyzer that produced Lite reviews with an ensemble: several agents contribute independent perspectives, and the combined output is what gets posted.

GitHub gives four numbers for the ensemble against the previous single-agent Lite. High-severity findings that reviewers went on to address are up 47 percent. Medium-severity findings are up 31 percent. Low-severity findings are up 11 percent. Review cost, which GitHub charges customers by, is down 8 percent by GitHub's rounding. All four are GitHub's own numbers on its own benchmark, so treat them as a claim about direction rather than a measurement anyone else has reproduced. The pattern is internally consistent: the biggest gains are in the high-severity group that reviewers care about most, and the smallest are in the low-severity group, where a small increase could be random variation.

For a team already using Copilot code review on every pull request, the default tier now catches more of the things a senior reviewer would point out, and does so without moving to the Full-effort tier. Together with the auto-resolution change, the review process asks the human reviewer to do less routine clean-up.

Source

GitHub Changelog, Auto-resolution and analysis updates in Copilot code review, 11 September 2026.