Skip to main content

Techorama 2026 - Building an agent into any app using the GitHub Copilot SDK

Techorama 2026 was a blast! Great content, great atmosphere and great people. And of course, the main conversation topic was AI and how it will shape our industry. Nobody knows what is coming next but at least we already got a glimpse into the future.

I delivered a presentation about integrating the GitHub Copilot SDK into your application and hopefully proved how easy it is to get an agent running inside your systems.

AI is moving from assistants we query to agents that collaborate with us inside our applications. By reusing the same agentic loop behind the Copilot CLI, the Copilot SDK makes that shift practical for every developer. In this session, we explore how to embed GitHub Copilot–powered agents directly into your apps, extend them with custom skills, and connect them to your own data and workflows. You’ll see how to design agent behaviors, orchestrate tool use, and create safe, reliable interactions that feel native to your product.


Whether you’re building personal productivity tools or enterprise workflows, you’ll walk away with a clear blueprint for turning your application into an AI‑augmented teammate.

In case you missed my presentation, you can find the slides here:

presentations/Techorama - 2026 at main · wullemsb/presentations

I also showed a lot of demos. Here is the overview of what I shared:

  • OLAF:
    • A command line interface to interact with the GitHub Copilot CLI harness that builds itself. It has a built-in extension mechanism allowing you to introduce new functionality in the command line during execution. It uses dynamic compilation and the Copilot SDK to create your own tailored coding CLI tool.
    • wullemsb/OLAF

 

  • The Oracle:
    • An automatic code reviewer that hooks into the Azure DevOps PR system. Once a PR is assigned to the Oracle, it will evaluate and review the provided changes.
    • wullemsb/AzureDevOpsCodeReviewer

Some other demo’s I showed that I didn’t create myself:

Check out the code to see what is possible and get inspired.

And if you want to get started, use the available skills or instructions for the GitHub Copilot SDK:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.

VS Code Planning mode

After the introduction of Plan mode in Visual Studio , it now also found its way into VS Code. Planning mode, or as I like to call it 'Hannibal mode', extends GitHub Copilot's Agent Mode capabilities to handle larger, multi-step coding tasks with a structured approach. Instead of jumping straight into code generation, Planning mode creates a detailed execution plan. If you want more details, have a look at my previous post . Putting plan mode into action VS Code takes a different approach compared to Visual Studio when using plan mode. Instead of a configuration setting that you can activate but have limited control over, planning is available as a separate chat mode/agent: I like this approach better than how Visual Studio does it as you have explicit control when plan mode is activated. Instead of immediately diving into execution, the plan agent creates a plan and asks some follow up questions: You can further edit the plan by clicking on ‘Open in Editor’: ...