Meta has released a new model, Llama 3.3 70B Instruct, now available in GitHub Models. It provides similar performance to Llama 3.1 405B, but at a significantely lower cost, making it a more accessible option for developers.
GitHub Models is a catalog and playground of AI models to help you build AI features and products.
Start exploring Llama 3.3 70B Instruct today in the playground or via the API. Compare it to the old model using the side-by-side feature in GitHub Models, and see the improvement for yourself!
Following our “Evolving GitHub Issues” announcement we’ve continued to improve the experience based on your feedback, including closing an issue as a duplicate, a REST API for sub-issues, and expanding the limits for both sub-issues and issue types.
These new features are all available in public preview for you to try. To gain access for your organization, please sign up here.
🧹 Close an issue as a duplicate
You can now close an issue as a duplicate of another issue, making it easier to manage your issues and provide more clarity on why they were closed.
When closing an issue, select Close as duplicate from the dropdown to search for and select the duplicate issue. You’ll then see an event in the timeline and note at the top making it clear why it was closed.
⚙ REST API support for sub-issues
You can now use the REST API to view, add, remove, and reprioritize sub-issues, making it easier to automate your use of sub-issues. Check out the documentation to learn more.
➕ Increased limits for sub-issues and issue types
You can now have up to 100 sub-issues per parent issue (up from 50), as well as up to 25 issue types in an organization (up from 10), making it easier to manage, classify, and break down work.
📱 Issue types on GitHub Mobile
You can now view, add, and update issue types on GitHub Mobile.
🔍 Improved filtering for sub-issues and issue types
You can use the has: and no: filters to search for sub-issues and issue types both from a project and the repository issues page, making it easier to find the exact set of issues you’re looking for and make updates.
Example filters include:
– no:type to find all issues that do not yet have a type
– no:parent-issue to find all issues without a parent issue
– has:sub-issue to find all issues that have sub-issues
✨ Additional improvements
On top of the many bug fixes we’ve shipped, we’ve also introduced the following improvements:
– If the sub-issue is from a different repository than the parent issue, you will now see the repository name in the sub-issues list.
– In GitHub markdown, pasting in a project link will now show the project name as well as more project details on hover.
– Projects insights charts now use Highcharts, which is an industry standard library for charts, improving our accessibility of projects insights.
– You can now use the UpdateProjectV2Field GraphQL API mutation to directly update all single select field options in one API.
You can now create and manage code security settings at the enterprise level. This change reduces the need for repetitive setup at the organization level.
Key updates:
– Apply configurations across all repositories in an enterprise, only to repos without existing configurations, or to newly created repos.
– Enforce settings across your enterprise, ensuring security policies are applied consistently.
– Enterprise configurations will also appear on the organization-level page, giving you the flexibility to manage centrally but deploy locally. This also enables you to roll out configurations, organization by organization.
In the latest Visual Studio Code release, you will find a suite of enhancements to GitHub Copilot, designed to make your coding and debugging experience in VS Code more productive and efficient. These features are now available for you to try out in the latest version of Visual Studio Code.
More relevant suggestions with extra options to add context
To give you suggestions and edits, Copilot collects information from your codebase. To give you even more specific and relevant responses, you can provide additional context to guide and focus Copilot. In this release, we’ve added more ways to add context for Copilot Chat and Copilot Edits.
You can now add symbols to the context to provide very detailed and specific context. Drag and drop a symbol from the Outline view or editor breadcrumb in the Chat view, or reference a symbol by typing #sym in the chat input field.
You can also add folders to the context to provide a broader context. Drag and drop a folder from the Explorer view into the Chat view to add all files in that folder to the context.
More efficient multi-file editing
With Copilot Edits (preview), you can get edit suggestions across multiple files in your project. We’ve made several enhancements to Copilot Edits to make the experience more efficient and easier to use.
Editor overlay controls: The overlay controls in the editor enable you to quickly navigate between suggested edits, review, and apply them. As Copilot Edits is generating edits, the overlay controls will show a progress indicator.
Move chat conversation to Copilot Edits: You might use Copilot Chat to explore ideas for making code changes. Instead of applying individual code blocks from chat, you can now move the chat session to Copilot Edits to apply all code suggestions from the session.
Working set: For large codebases, it can be hard to add the right files to the working set. VS Code can now suggest relevant files to add to the working set, so you get the most relevant edits across your project. And to make adding to the working even more efficient, drag files from the Explorer view or Search view to add them to the working set.
Restore edit sessions: Copilot Edits now saves and restores your edit session across VS Code restarts, so you can continue where you left off.
Kickstart debugging with copilot-debug
Setting up a debugging environment can be challenging, especially when you’re working with a new codebase or project. With the new copilot-debug terminal command, you can ask Copilot to generate a launch configuration for you based on your project’s setup. And if your project needs a compilation step before debugging, Copilot can generate a task for that too.
Copilot can help you generate commit messages based on the changes you’ve made. In this release, we added support for custom instructions when generating a commit message. For example, if your commit messages need to follow a specific format, you can describe this in the custom instructions.
Use the github.copilot.chat.commitMessageGeneration.instructions setting to either specify the custom instructions directly, or to specify a file from your workspace that contains the custom instructions. These instructions are appended to the prompt that is used to generate the commit message. Get more information on how to use custom instructions.
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The refreshed pull request commits page, which was previously in public preview, is now generally available! This updated page improves performance, is more consistent with other pages across GitHub, and is accessible to more users.
Your feedback during the public preview helped us deliver a better experience, including better keyboard navigation. If you have additional feedback, please let us know in the GitHub Community.
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We will now post updates and status interruptions in real-time on GitHub Community. We understand that no product is perfect, and there will be times when unsuspected degradations or outages occur. To make information as open and accessible as possible, any incident that occurs and is on our GitHub status page will have a corresponding discussion post on GitHub Community.
This will give you a centralized thread in Community Discussions for you to share your experiences and find up to date information as it impacts your work.
What can you expect?
If an incident occurs and is on our GitHub status page, a discussion will post declaring the incident in the community
The ability to subscribe to an open incident discussion for real-time updates
Subsequent updates to post on the incident’s discussion thread
When an incident is resolved, you will see a marked answer and an image indicating the incident is resolved
If available, a link to the public incident summary
Questions or feedback? We want to hear from you! Join our Community discussion to share.
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You can now fork a public repository to your personal account directly from GitHub Mobile! This new feature allows you to easily create your own copy of a public repository on the go, making it simpler to contribute to open source projects, experiment with new ideas, or collaborate with others. It’s easier than ever to contribute to your favorite projects anytime, anywhere.
After this period, these endpoints will no longer be available. Instead, you can use the organization roles API to perform the same actions and much more.
Retirement Timeline
GitHub.com: 2025-12-31
GitHub Enterprise Server: Version 3.20
Replacements
The organization roles API offers enhanced capabilities for managing roles across an organization. Use the following endpoint as a replacement:
You can start transitioning to the organization roles API today on GitHub.com. For GitHub Enterprise Server users, the organization roles API will support the security manager role starting in version 3.16.
We’re excited to announce that persistent commit signature verification is now generally available! This powerful feature ensures that commit signatures are verified once at the time of the push and remain permanently verified within their respective repository’s network.
With persistent commit signature verification, commit signatures retain their verified status even if signing keys are rotated, revoked, or contributors leave the organization. You can view verification timestamps by hovering over the Verified badge on GitHub or by accessing the verified_at field through the REST API.
This feature brings long-term reliability to your commit history, offering a consistent solution for managing commit signatures over time. New commits have had persistent records since the public preview launch. Existing commits progressively gain persistent records during their next verification, such as when viewing the Verified badge on GitHub or retrieving the commit via the REST API.
Reviewers can now add comments to push protection bypass requests in secret scanning. These comments help provide context, explaining the reasoning behind approving or denying a request. Requesters gain clarity on why their request was denied, and other reviewers can better understand why a request was approved or denied.
The comment is included in the response email sent to the requester, as well as in the timeline of the resulting alert, the API, the audit log, and webhook responses.
The metrics overview for CodeQL pull request alerts now includes enhanced tracking and reporting mechanisms, resulting in greater accuracy and more CodeQL pull request alerts and Copilot Autofixes displayed on the dashboard.
These changes retroactively affect the dashboard numbers, allowing you to effectively monitor your organization’s security posture.
With these insights, you can proactively identify and address security risks before they reach your default branch. The metrics overview for CodeQL pull request alerts helps you understand how effectively CodeQL prevents vulnerabilities in your organization. You can use these metrics to easily identify the repositories where action is needed to mitigate security risks.
The change is now generally available on GitHub Enterprise Cloud.
GitHub Copilot Extensions can now access local context in your editor and github.com to provide you with richer and more tailored responses.
As a developer, you can benefit from context passing when interacting with extensions. Passing context to extensions will continue to maintain security through permission controls set by your administrators and content exclusion rules.
Available contexts by development environment
Environment
client.file
client.selection
github.repository
github.current-url
Additional contexts
Visual Studio Code
✔️
✔️
✔️
X
Repository owner and branch
Visual Studio
✔️
✔️
✔️
X
Repository owner and branch
github.com
X
X
✔️
✔️
Repository information and other GitHub resources
GitHub Mobile
X
X
X
✔️
X
JetBrains IDEs
X
X
X
X
X
Local context is not passed to extensions by default.
Requirements for developers
Access to GitHub Copilot Extensions
Admin authorization to install on organization-owned repos
Requirements for builders
Explicit requests to receive editor context, configured in your GitHub app settings
Update your APIs to handle new reference types and account for certain references only being available in certain contexts
Connect with our community in our Discussion Forum, or relay your feedback here.
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Bring your GitHub contributions to life with the new GitHub Skyline CLI extension – visualize, customize, and 3D print your journey in open source, all from the command line!
Go
🛠️ Features
Binary STL generation: Turn your contribution data into 3D-printed works of art.
Customizable year selection: Show off a single year or flex with multi-year masterpieces.
Automatic authentication: Uses your GitHub credentials or specify another user.
ASCII art previews: See your contribution skyline before it’s immortalized IRL.
💻 Quick Start
If you already have GitHub CLI installed, installation is as easy as:
gh extension install github/gh-skyline
Generate a skyline:
gh skyline --year 2024
Generate a skyline for a specific user and year range:
As you may have seen in Discord a few weeks ago, Copilot Workspace is graduating! It is a very exciting time, and also a time of change. So before getting into the product changes from this week, we want to highlight a few logistical changes, because everyone loves logistics 💪
Changelog location: All future Copilot Workspace changelogs will be posted here, rather than in the user manual repository. Since you’re already reading this week’s changelog here, you’re ahead of the curve. Great work!
How to provide feedback: We are also transitioning from the current Discord to a GitHub Discussion as the primary place for feedback and discussions around Copilot Workspace. We will still be available in Discord, but posting in the discussion will ensure we see your feedback sooner.
Okay, now onto the product updates for this week! 🎉
Building on recent improvements to file and image support, you can now preview images directly in the Workspace editor. Selecting an image from the file tree will now display a full preview of the image, letting you open a preview tab directly within the editor.
Simplifying the Experience
Since our last changes dropped we have invested time into streamlining the Workspace experience, saving you clicks, headaches, and frustration.
Reducing Action Button Clicks
We updated the primary action button such that secondary actions available in the dropdown no longer require a second click of the primary button – when you select an action it will immediately take effect.
Consolidating the Plan Action Buttons
We have also consolidated plan action buttons like Regenerate and Add File to a kebab menu.
Before:
After:
VS Code Extension Updates
Stale View Fix: Resolved an issue where stale view states were retained in certain views.
Push to Branch / PR Creation Fix: Fixed failures when merging into an existing branch with updates to the same files.
Binary Detection Fix: Addressed a false positive issue where folders were incorrectly flagged as binary after session syncing stopped.
Enhanced Session List: Sessions now appear earlier in their lifecycle in the session list, supporting the new brainstorming feature in VS Code.
Error Message Visibility: Resolved cases where certain error messages did not display.
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Copilot Chat on GitHub.com, GitHub Mobile, the GitHub CLI, as well as officially supported IDEs now have a 64k token window available when working with OpenAI GPT-4o. With this change, customers working with large files and repositories should expect improved responses from Copilot. This change helps Copilot retrieve more information when executing skills to provide contextually relevant responses.
There is no action required on your part to benefit from this upgrade, it is automatically available for all GitHub Copilot users. For more information, check out our documentation and join the discussion within the GitHub Copilot Community.
Hungry for more? – 128k token window for VS Code Insiders
If you’re using GitHub Copilot with Visual Studio Code Insiders, you have access to an even larger 128k context window – the maximum supported by OpenAI GPT-4o. Download the Insiders build to try it out.
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Starting today, you can now view runner labels in the Jobs tab of your Actions metrics. You can filter by the runner label to view runner specific metrics and answer questions such as:
– “What is the average queue time for my runner?”
– “Which repositories are using my runner?”
– “Which jobs are using the ubuntu-latest label?”
To access the feature, on your organization home page, select Insights near the top of the page, and then select ‘Actions Performance Metrics’ on the left side of the page.
To learn more about GitHub Actions Metrics, check out our public documentation or head to our community discussion to ask questions and provide feedback.
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GitHub Models now supports the ability to retrieve structured JSON responses from models, making it easier to integrate AI outputs into applications and workflows.
While this functionality was already available via our API, this update adds it to the UI.
Supported models include OpenAI (except for o1-mini and o1-preview) and Mistral models.
We are pleased to announce that our most recent SOC reports (1, 2, and 3) are available now and include GitHub Enterprise Cloud for github.com with all new regions like the EU, as well as Copilot Business and Enterprise. These reports are applicable for the 6-month period April 1, 2024 to September 30, 2024 and are available on the GitHub Enterprise Trust Center for our customers.
This represents a significant milestone for GitHub and our customers for multiple reasons:
– Copilot Business and Enterprise are now gaining coverage of control operating effectiveness over the period represented by a Type II report (as opposed to the point-in-time reports represented by the previous Type I reports issued Spring 2024)
– Coverage for Enterprises hosted in either dotcom or the newly launched EU region.
– Future regions launched for GitHub Enterprise Cloud will also be compliant.
These efforts and the culminating SOC 2 Type II reports represent GitHub’s ongoing commitment to provide secure products to our customers, which continues to provide developers the assurance to build software better, together.
Looking forward, bridge letters will be coming mid-January 2025 for the gap period representing October through December 2024. Additionally, the next round of SOC reports covering October 1, 2024 to March 31, 2025 will be available to customers in June 2025.
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We will migrate the ubuntu-latest label to ubuntu 24 starting on December 5, 2024 and ending on January 17, 2025. The ubuntu 24 image has a different set of tools and packages than ubuntu 22. We have made cuts to the list of packages so that we can maintain our SLA for free disk space. This may break your workflows if you depend on certain packages that have been removed. Please review this list to see if you are using any affected packages.
Ubuntu 20 image is closing down
We are beginning the process of closing down the Ubuntu 20 hosted runner image, following our N-1 OS support policy. This image will be fully retired by April 1, 2025. We recommend updating workflows to use ubuntu-22.04, or ubuntu-24.04.
Artifacts v3 brownouts
Artifact actions v3 will be closing down by January 30th, 2025. To raise awareness of the upcoming removal, we will temporarily fail jobs using v3 of actions/upload-artifact or actions/download-artifact. Builds that are scheduled to run during the brownout periods will fail. The brownouts are scheduled for the following dates and times:
– January 9th 5pm – 6pm UTC
– January 16th 3pm – 7pm UTC
– January 23rd 2pm – 10pm UTC
actions/cache v1-v2 and actions/toolkit cache package closing down
Starting February 1st, 2025, Actions’ cache storage will move to a new architecture, as a result we are closing down v1-v2 of actions/cache as well as all previous versions of the @actions/cache package(prior to 4.0.0) in actions/toolkit.
Attempting to use a version of the @actions/cache package after the announced deprecation date will result in a workflow failure. Announcements have been posted in the actions/cache and actions/toolkit repositories with additional information on the migration. Note that this does not affect GitHub Enterprise Server customers, you can continue to use all versions without failure.
Updates to the network allow list for self-hosted runners and Azure private networking
With the upcoming GA of Immutable Actions, Actions will now be stored as packages in the GitHub Container Registry. Please ensure that your self-hosted runner allow lists are updated to accommodate the network traffic. Specifically, you should allow traffic to pkg.actions.githubusercontent.com to ensure Immutable Actions can be downloaded successfully and jobs don’t fail during setup. If you already allow *.actions.githubusercontent.com which is listed as an required domain then no action is necessary. Traffic will also be required to ghcr.io for publishing new versions of an Immutable Action in the future, which will be available with the GA release.
This update also affects runners in all versions of GitHub Enterprise Server that use the GitHub Connect feature to download actions directly from github.com. Customers are advised to update their self-hosted runner network allow lists accordingly. For further guidance on communication between self-hosted runners and GitHub, please refer to our documentation.
Additionally, our guidance for configuring Azure private networking has been updated to account for the new domains. The following IP addresses have been added to the NSG template in our documentation.
– 140.82.121.33/32
– 140.82.121.34/32
– 140.82.113.33/32
– 140.82.113.34/32
– 140.82.112.33/32
– 140.82.112.34/32
– 140.82.114.33/32
– 140.82.114.34/32
– 192.30.255.164/31
– 4.237.22.32/32
– 20.217.135.1/32
– 4.225.11.196/32
– 20.26.156.211/32
Upcoming breaking image changes
For a full list of this month’s breaking changes to our hosted runner images, please see our announcement page.
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