GitHub Copilot app for Beginners

GitHub Copilot app for Beginners is an open-source, MIT-licensed course repository from GitHub. It teaches developers how to direct and orchestrate AI coding agents from the GitHub Copilot desktop app, using a hands-on React/Vite sample project.

What It Is

The course is a structured set of chapters on the GitHub Copilot app, which the README describes as a desktop control center where sessions, plans, code changes, tests, browser previews, AI chats, issues, and pull requests come together. Learners practice giving agents a goal and context, then reviewing and validating the results instead of treating the app as a code-generation button. No agentic development experience is required, though basic GitHub, Git, and software development familiarity helps.

Course Structure

Chapters 00-07 cover setup, a tour of the app, sessions with worktrees and context, development and GitHub workflows, skills and custom agents, MCP servers and plugins, canvases, and automations. Each chapter after setup follows the same pattern: an introduction, a recording-studio analogy, core concepts, hands-on exercises in samples/book-app-web, and key takeaways with an assignment from Chapter 02 on. Appendices include a glossary, a Git worktrees guide, training scenarios, and a troubleshooting reference.

What Learners Practice

• Installing, signing in, and setting up the app
• Starting sessions from prompts, branches, and pull requests, and attaching issues as context
• Choosing between Interactive, Plan, and Autopilot modes
• Using worktree-backed sessions so work does not collide with the main branch
• Reviewing diffs, running tests, previewing a web app, and handling PR review comments and failing checks
• Creating review skills and read-only custom agents, retrieving documentation through an MCP server, and building canvases and scheduled automations

Where the App Fits

The README compares the Copilot app with Copilot in IDEs, Copilot CLI, and the Copilot cloud agent, positioning the desktop app for supervising multi-agent sessions. It notes the app works with a Copilot plan or your own model provider. The repository documents course updates for app version 1.1.26.