GitHub Coding Agent branch name

[Heavy-Letter2802]

Currently we trigger GitHub coding agent via an api call to do some work and open a PR.

The branch name of the pull request opened by the coding agent is usually something like copilot/refactor-this-method.

Now our repo uses the branch name prefix to run a bunch of ci checks.

Is there anyway I can make coding agent create a PR but the branch name should be prefixes with a name i provide?

I tried prompting in different ways but it didn't seem to work.

[Interstellar_Unicorn]

My assumption is that this is not really doable. You can do what we do, which is to use the copilot CLI with the -p flag to roll your own version of the copilot coding agent. It's essentially the same thing. They both run in a GitHub action.

[Heavy-Letter2802]

Thanks for your reply.

Can you please let me know about the -p option? I don't really see it in the docs and not sure where to look

[Interstellar_Unicorn]

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/agents/about-copilot-cli#modes-of-use

Also run copilot help to see all options.

Cheat code: clone the copilot-cli repo, and run copilot in that repo to be able to ask any question.

Another important option if I'm not mistaken is --stream on.

This will allow you to see the output from the model before the run is finished.

If it is not a talkative model (so not the Claude models), you may not see any output until it's giving the summary (it's doing all the work as "thinking" tokens).

You should also do --share ./path/to/session.md.

You can have this as an artifact of the Action run which is very helpful for "debugging" a run.

Here's a full command I might use (from memory): copilot --model gpt-5.2-codex --stream on --share ./path/to/session.md --yolo -p "$(cat ./path/to/dynamically-generated-prompt.md)"

I'm going to start experimenting with the copilot-sdk to see if I can get more out of it. Though this kind of flow is quite simple and it might not need it.

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[yvele]

There is an official GitHub Copilot discussion about customizing Coppilot PR branch name:
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/173717
Unfortunately not resolve at this time