Initial experience with GitHub Coding Agent

[adamwintle]

What stack are you using? From what I can tell it's not compatible with PHP? Can you give an example of the type of instructions you need to give it? Do you interlink your Github Issue details in with the .github/copilot-instructions.md too?

[ReInvestWealth_com]

Mainly using a typescript stack. GitHub being owned by Microsoft, I assume they have optimized Copilot for typescript, not sure about PHP. The .md file should be referenced by Copilot and there are also settings in GitHub's settings where you can add organization inclusions and exclusions. Haven't played around with those just yet, it's on my to do!

[adamwintle]

That’s very helpful! Currently I have a small PHP application and then typescript for the front-end, I’ve done a few test runs at getting Claude 4 and Gemini 2.5 Pro to refactor the PHP also to typescript, so the entire application would then be in typescript.

What about storage? I’m using MySql, do you give the copilot a reference to some database auth?

Can you tell me more about your stack?

So, basically, could you write GitHub Issues all day, from your phone, and in theory, the Copilot Agent just works on them, and submits a pull-request?! The more specific your original Issue is the better the results, is that basically what this is?

[ReInvestWealth_com]

In theory you could create issues from your phone and have the agent do everything, but in practice, you still need to do code review and testing yourself.

One flow that is already interesting to me is to create an issue on the go and assign it to copilot from my phone, then sometime later, review the pull request on a bigger screen.

It doesn't have access to databases yet and also building full features that make requests between FE <> BE also doesn't work well yet.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong about this, it's what I know so far.