GitHub’s weekly Copilot roundup for the week of August 24, published August 28, 2026, brings together changes across the Copilot CLI, Copilot app, collaboration tools, IDEs, and enterprise administration. The most immediately useful additions include more documented CLI management commands, session reopening, a centralized customization surface in the Copilot app, and collaborative cloud-agent sessions in Slack and Microsoft Teams.
The update also matters for platform teams. Enterprise-managed settings can govern permissions, MCP servers, plugins, telemetry, sandboxing, model selection, and related controls across several Copilot clients. However, availability differs substantially: Slack and Teams remain public previews, WSL support in the Copilot app is experimental, and some IDE-specific details are only described in the weekly roundup.
What changed in the August Copilot roundup
The roundup covers several product areas rather than one single feature release. In the original announcement, GitHub describes new or expanded capabilities for Copilot CLI, the Copilot app, Slack, Microsoft Teams, JetBrains IDEs, VS Code, and Visual Studio.
For developers working from a terminal, Copilot CLI adds execution and permission-mode settings, management for plugins, MCP servers, and skills, session recovery, and a native Rust runtime. The supplied CLI reference documents the management commands and interactive modes, but it does not establish the exact CLI version that introduced these changes, runtime requirements, supported operating systems, or distribution channels.
The Copilot app’s Customize tab is generally available. It provides a place to discover and manage MCP servers, plugins, skills, canvases, and custom instructions. The Copilot app documentation says the app is available on all Copilot plans. Repository-configured skills and MCP servers, including configurations created for Copilot CLI, can be available automatically. Users can also install MCP servers, browse plugins and marketplaces, manage installed customizations, and configure global or repository-specific instructions.
GitHub also lists experimental WSL support in the Copilot app. The supplied documentation does not establish which WSL distributions are supported or describe the feature’s limitations, so teams should treat this as an area for testing rather than assume broad compatibility.
Slack and Teams bring Copilot sessions into shared conversations
Copilot cloud-agent sessions can now be used collaboratively through Slack and Microsoft Teams. These sessions can support investigation, planning, implementation, issue and pull-request work, and asynchronous tasks. Participants can add context, correct assumptions, continue tasks, and review resulting artifacts.
The Slack integration is in public preview and is available for paid Copilot plans. It requires a GitHub account with a paid plan, membership in a Slack workspace, the GitHub Slack integration, and cloud sandboxes enabled for the plan. The Slack integration documentation also makes an important permissions distinction: people in a shared context can provide input, but only users with repository write access can trigger Copilot to make changes. Guest workspace members and repository outside collaborators cannot start or steer a session.
Slack uses the full conversation thread as context and creates a dedicated Slack Code channel for the session. Work continues asynchronously in a secure cloud sandbox, and archived Slack Code channels remain viewable and searchable. Teams should therefore consider what information is present in a thread before starting a session. Direct messages may be preferable when limiting the context is important.
Pull requests created from Slack shared contexts use the app identity instead of a user’s personal identity. Repositories that already require at least one approval require one additional approval for these unattributed Copilot pull requests. That behavior can affect existing review and repository-ruleset workflows.
Microsoft Teams support is also in public preview. According to the Teams documentation, users can initiate and steer cloud-agent sessions in direct messages, threads, and channels. A Teams workspace administrator must install the GitHub app, and users must connect and authorize a GitHub account through it.
Enterprise controls cover permissions and extensibility
Enterprise administrators can use managed settings for Copilot CLI, VS Code, the GitHub Copilot app, Copilot cloud agent, and JetBrains IDEs. Supported controls include plugins and marketplaces, telemetry, MCP server allowlists and denylists, model selection, permission rules, sandbox settings, and remote control.
The enterprise-managed settings documentation defines precedence for managed-settings.json: MDM-managed settings take priority over server-managed settings, followed by file-based settings and then user-level settings. Deny rules take precedence over ask and allow rules, while denied MCP servers take precedence over allowed MCP servers.
Administrators can disable bypass or YOLO-style modes, require fresh approval for selected operations, allow specified operations without prompts, and restrict actions using shell, file-path, edit, and domain selectors. These controls are useful for standardizing how Copilot operates in managed environments, but they should be tested against each client and workflow before broad deployment.
What developers and administrators should do
- Use the Copilot CLI command reference for supported management operations such as
copilot mcp,copilot plugin,copilot skill, andcopilot plugins list. - Use the documented standard, plan, and autopilot interactive modes, along with
/resumeor--continuefor session selection. Test recovery behavior before making it part of a recovery-sensitive process because the supplied reference does not document every state-preservation detail announced in the roundup. - Do not assume that
defaultModeordefaultPermissionModeare supported configuration keys. The supplied CLI reference does not document those names, their accepted values, or their file and environment-variable syntax. - Review the Copilot app Customize tab before enabling MCP servers, plugins, skills, or canvases. Check both global and repository-specific instructions for unintended differences in behavior.
- For Slack evaluations, confirm paid-plan access, cloud-sandbox enablement, Slack integration installation, and repository write access. Review thread content and account for app-identity pull requests in approval workflows.
- For Teams evaluations, arrange administrator installation of the GitHub app and complete GitHub account authorization before testing shared sessions.
- For enterprise rollouts, review settings precedence, permission rules, MCP restrictions, plugin controls, telemetry settings, sandbox settings, and model defaults. Validate the resulting policy on every supported client that matters to the organization.
Availability and documentation limits
The Customize tab is generally available, while Slack and Teams integrations are public previews and WSL support in the Copilot app is experimental. The supplied sources do not establish feature-specific prerequisites for the VS Code 1.135 or Visual Studio changes mentioned in the roundup. They also do not document VS Code second-opinion eligibility or supported models, or Visual Studio model names, pricing, usage limits, custom-agent sharing details, and Git-agent review controls.
Those IDE announcements can be reported as part of GitHub’s August 24 roundup, but implementation and eligibility details should not be inferred beyond the announcement. The same caution applies to the CLI runtime and exact release versions. The documentation available here may describe current integration behavior rather than the precise conditions of the initial rollout.
