Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

Curious to try this against the Github (website) Agent. The website Agent is definitely dumber than the vscode agent (because it has to spend 20 minutes figuring out how to build and start my monorepo apps) but on the flip side, it doesn't take up my computer and thus any value it creates is additive.

We have tried out Gemini code review vs Copilot code review and Gemini is consistently offering better code review tips. It has officially caught multiple potential bugs, even a few that reviewers might have missed, so it's definitely been additive.

Observability looks way worse. Github Agent has a full UX built into the Github PR that lets you dig into the agent behavior. This requires you to egress text logs and make sense of it yourself.

Also curious about customization. Github just rolled out "agent writes its own instructions" https://github.blog/changelog/2025-08-06-copilot-coding-agen... which is super cool, how do I customize this one and teach it how to start and manage apps across my monorepo?

> Curious to try this against the Github (website) Agent. The website Agent is definitely dumber than the vscode agent (because it has to spend 20 minutes figuring out how to build and start my monorepo apps) but on the flip side, it doesn't take up my computer and thus any value it creates is additive.

Yeah that's on you. Add a `copilot-instructions.md` file and configure the `copilot-setup-steps.yml` workflow to setup your environment. Both are supported more or less since Copilot Agent got released (though in "preview")

Most agents read `AGENTS.md`, I just symlink it to CLAUDE.md, and do the same for GEMINI.md

I have a well documented copilot-instructions.md (and have used githubs new agentic self-documentation prompt) and the reality is that it takes about 15-20 minutes to build and start multiple react, reactnative and expressjs projects.

Github now appears to support defining setup tasks in a Github Action that runs prior to the agent, so that's the next avenue of research.

Regardless, the website agent will always be slower. My local is already running and fully ready to go so the ide agent can hit the ground running on any task. The website agent has to spin up a machine and install and build. It will take time.

Tim from the GitHub Copilot coding agent product team here!

@artdigital is on the money here. Our quick tip for beginners is to use `copilot-instructions.md` (which we can now generate for you <3), but for more serious use, we'd strongly recommend adding `copilot-setup-steps.yml`.

That gets you a deterministic setup - and for many teams, it'll be easy, as you can just copy and paste from existing Actions workflows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com