March ‘25 enterprise content roundup

Published via GitHub Executive Insights | Authored by Dave Burnison

GitHub is shipping new features, product updates, and best practices faster than ever. To help you stay ahead, our Enterprise Advocacy team has curated this monthly roundup—bringing you a concise, enterprise-focused summary of the most important updates you might have missed.

Below, you’ll find a carefully selected list of key innovations, expert insights, and must-know resources—guided by feedback from GitHub’s largest customers—to help your team innovate faster, boost productivity, and enhance security. Share with your teams and stakeholders so they can also get the most out of their GitHub experience.

Let’s dive in!

AI & ML - GitHub Copilot

All things GitHub Copilot, from new and upcoming features to research and data collected from customers showing how GitHub Copilot is accelerating developer productivity.

YouTube

• 📺 GitHub Copilot: the agent awakens (6:19): The most recent updates to VS Code and GitHub Copilot are game-changers for your productivity. See all the features in action, and explore them in your own projects and workloads.

• 📺 AI-powered development: Exploring the latest GitHub Copilot features (2:43): Discover the latest evolution of GitHub Copilot, the world's most used AI developer tool, now smarter and more powerful than ever! We’ll show how Copilot is transforming the way developers work with features like: intent-detection & codebase indexing, Copilot Edits, Model Choices and Copilot Autofix.

• 📺 Build AI Apps Faster with GitHub Copilot for Azure: See It in Action! (2:20): Learn how GitHub Copilot for Azure, now available as an extension for VS Code, simplifies building and deploying AI applications on Azure. Whether you're an experienced developer or new to Azure, this tool can accelerate your journey.

• 📺 GitHub Copilot Upgrade Assistant for Java: Try It First! (1:24): Introducing the GitHub Copilot Upgrade Assistant for Java, now in technical preview! This powerful tool simplifies upgrading Java applications, helping you modernize your Java applications.

GitHub Blog

• GitHub Copilot: The agent awakens: We are upgrading GitHub Copilot with the force of even more agentic AI – introducing agent mode. Agent mode is capable of iterating on its own code, recognizing errors, and fixing them automatically. It can suggest terminal commands and ask you to execute them. It also analyzes run-time errors with self-healing capabilities. In agent mode, Copilot will iterate on not just its own output, but the result of that output. And it will iterate until it has completed all the subtasks required to complete your prompt.

• How to use GitHub Copilot: What it can do and real-world examples: When is the last time you stepped back and took a look at everything that GitHub Copilot can actually do? GitHub Copilot has evolved to cover a bunch of different use cases, workflows, coding languages, and much more. We’ll update this list as GitHub Copilot continues to evolve and we add new, awesome features like we’ve been doing since we first launched it a few years ago.

• How to refactor code with GitHub Copilot: Sometimes refactoring code can be really easy. But the more you dig into it, the more it grows, and you might find yourself facing down the Herculean task of trying to refactor a codebase that stretches across multiple files from a larger team of developers. Discover how to use GitHub Copilot to refactor your code and see samples of it in action.

• Documenting and explaining legacy code with GitHub Copilot: Tips and examples: Learn how to document and explain legacy code with GitHub Copilot with real-world examples. In this blog post, we’ll explore practical tips and examples for using GitHub Copilot to document and explain legacy code effectively. Whether you’re dealing with a monolithic application, cryptic comments, or no documentation at all, these techniques will help you bring clarity to your codebase and set it up for long-term success.

• How we evaluate AI models and LLMs for GitHub Copilot: We recently expanded the models available in GitHub Copilot (See the recent Changelogs below). GitHub’s goal is to create the best quality, most responsible AI coding assistant possible, and that guides the decision we have to make about which models to support within the product. It’s tempting to hop immediately to the latest models. But just because a model is newer doesn’t mean it will perform better for your use case. In this article, we’ll share some of the GitHub Copilot team’s experience evaluating AI models.

GitHub Docs

• 📄 Copilot Chat Cookbook: Find examples of prompts to use with GitHub Copilot Chat.

• 📄 Using Copilot to migrate a project to another programming language: Migrating a project to a new programming language can be a difficult and time-consuming task. This guide describes what's involved in a migration process and gives an example of a PHP to Python migration.

GitHub Changelog

• Vision, agent mode, next edit suggestions, and more for GitHub Copilot in VS Code January release (v0.24): In the latest Visual Studio Code release, you will find a range of GitHub Copilot features 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 VS Code.

• View and iterate on generated files directly within Copilot chat (Preview): File suggestions open in a side panel, making it faster than ever to preview and refine your generated code.

• Copilot Workspace: Auto-validation, go to definition, and more: We’re excited to share the latest improvements for Copilot Workspace, including enabling enterprise managed users, auto-validating changes in the workspace, and more.

• Edit and validate Copilot Autofix suggestions with Copilot Workspace: Copilot Autofix suggestions for code scanning alerts can now be edited and validated using Copilot Workspace for pull requests.

• Custom repository instructions are now available for Copilot on GitHub.com (Public Preview): GitHub Copilot Chat now supports repository-specific custom instructions, giving you a more tailored and personalized chat experience. This means you can provide Copilot with important details about your development stack, coding standards, or even how you prefer to chat.

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Dave’s Bonus Info! In addition to the resources we provide, it's also helpful to see real-world examples. GitHub partners very closely with the VS Code team who co-develops many of GitHub Copilot's new capabilities. Go beyond the documentation and check out the VS Code team's custom instructions and see if you can draw inspiration from this example to enable your team's use of custom instructions to take flight: VS Code custom instructions for GitHub Copilot

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• Copilot Users Can Ask About A Failed Actions Job (GA): Simply press “Explain Error” from the pull request merge box or the Actions job page to chat with Copilot about why a job failed, and get tailored guidance on how to resolve the issue.

• GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio 2022 Version 17.13: GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio 17.13: New features to supercharge your development workflow

• GitHub Copilot code completions now in public preview for Eclipse: We’re excited to announce that code completions with GitHub Copilot in Eclipse are now in public preview!

• GitHub Copilot for Xcode Chat now in public preview: We’re excited to announce that GitHub Copilot for Xcode Chat is now in public preview!

• GitHub Copilot in JetBrains IDEs: @project context and commit message suggestions: The GitHub Copilot plugin for JetBrains IDES now helps you ask questions about your entire codebase, via @project, and Copilot can help you out even more by generating commit message suggestions.

• We recently expanded the models available in GitHub Copilot. Here are some of the latest related updates:

  • Google Gemini 2.0 Flash is now available to all Copilot users in public preview
  • OpenAI GPT-4.5 in GitHub Copilot now available in public preview
  • OpenAI o3-mini is now available in GitHub Copilot Free

AI & ML - GitHub Models

AI & ML updates beyond GitHub Copilot. There were a few key updates related to the GitHub Models playground.

YouTube

• 📺 Try the latest AI models with GitHub Models - now with OpenAI's o3-mini and DeepSeek-R1 (0:59): GitHub Models, available in the GitHub Marketplace, provides developer access to a curated selection of industry-leading AI models from providers like OpenAI, Meta, Cohere, Microsoft, and Mistral. Stay up-to-date with the latest AI models like o3-mini and DeepSeek-R1.

Changelog

• DeepSeek-R1 is now available in GitHub Models (Public Preview)

• OpenAI o3-mini now available in GitHub Copilot and GitHub Models (Public Preview)

• Phi-4 is now available in GitHub Models (GA)

• Codestral 25.01 is now available in GitHub Models (GA)

• GitHub Models introduces a new prompt editor (GA): This powerful tool is designed to provide a focused and intuitive experience for crafting and testing your inputs, enabling you to optimize prompts for maximum performance and relevance in your projects.

• GitHub Models prompt editor now integrates with user repository code [GA]: You can now iterate on your prompt in any user repositories without breaking your flow. With just one click, jump from a prompt in your GitHub-hosted code to the GitHub Models prompt editor.

• GitHub Models introduces JSON schema support for response formats: You can now specify a custom JSON schema as a response format, alongside the existing text and recently released general JSON option.

Security

Application security with GitHub, ensuring the code that lives in GitHub and the dependencies that go into the solutions you build are secure.

Changelog

• Find secrets in your organization with the secret risk assessment: GitHub is committed to empowering the developer community by helping organizations recognize and address the risks of secret leaks. That’s why we’re launching a new free tool next month which will provide clear insights into their exposure, along with actionable steps to strengthen their security and protect their code.

• Recent improvements to security campaigns with Copilot Autofix (public preview): Today we are announcing multiple improvements based on the customer feedback we have received during the security campaigns public preview.

• EMU enterprise access restrictions via corporate proxies (public preview): With enterprise access restrictions via corporate proxies, you can now configure your network proxy or firewall to inject a header into your users’ web and API requests to github.com. This signal tells GitHub to block the request if it is from a user outside of your EMU enterprise.

• Dependabot helps users focus on the most important alerts by including EPSS scores that indicate likelihood of exploitation, now generally available: Dependabot alerts now feature the Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS) from the global Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST), helping you better assess vulnerability risks.

Blog

• How GitHub uses CodeQL to secure GitHub: How GitHub’s Product Security Engineering team manages our CodeQL implementation at scale and how you can, too.

• How to secure your GitHub Actions workflows with CodeQL: In the last few months, we secured 75+ GitHub Actions workflows in open source projects, disclosing 90+ different vulnerabilities. Out of this research we produced new support for workflows in CodeQL, empowering you to secure yours. See also, Improved code scanning coverage for GitHub Actions (Public Preview)

CI/CD

Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment with GitHub Actions.

Changelog

• Copilot Users Can Ask About A Failed Actions Job (GA): Simply press “Explain Error” from the pull request merge box or the Actions job page to chat with Copilot about why a job failed, and get tailored guidance on how to resolve the issue.

• Larger hosted runner enhancements: Edit runner size and Windows Server 4vCPU runner availability: Starting today, you can edit the size of your larger hosted runners. For customers using static IPs, you can size up or down while keeping your IP addresses the same. Also, we now offer Windows Server on a 4vCPU machine using the Windows 2025 image.

• Actions: GitHub-hosted larger runner & network configuration REST APIs (GA): Actions larger runner REST APIs are now generally available. These new APIs empower you to programmatically create larger runners, assign them to a runner group, configure network settings for Azure private networking, and apply these configurations to specific runner groups.

• Linux arm64 hosted runners now available for free in public repositories (Public Preview): Now in public preview, Linux arm64 hosted runners are available for free in public repositories. Following the release of arm64 larger hosted runners in June, this offering now extends to the open source-community.

Blog

• How to secure your GitHub Actions workflows with CodeQL: In the last few months, we secured 75+ GitHub Actions workflows in open source projects, disclosing 90+ different vulnerabilities. Out of this research we produced new support for workflows in CodeQL, empowering you to secure yours.

The GitHub Platform

Resources to assist those who manage the rollout and maintenance of GitHub for hundreds if not thousands of stakeholders.

GitHub Resources

• Announcing the launch of GitHub Well-Architected 🎉: A new and ever-evolving resource designed to help organizations effectively adopt and deploy the GitHub platform. It combines design thinking with prescriptive recommendations, empowering leaders and GitHub administrators to achieve their highest priority business goals.

YouTube

• 📺 Govern your repositories with Push Rulesets (0:59): Need to restrict updates to sensitive files like GitHub Action workflows? Or enforcing code hygiene in your repository by limiting which objects can be pushed? Then you'll want to check out GitHub push rulesets!

Changelog

• GitHub Enterprise Cloud Data Residency in Australia is generally available: With this release, teams can enhance productivity and collaboration while gaining more control over their code to meet their data residency preferences. This will help customers in the Asia-Pacific region optimize performance and maintain availability while using GitHub Enterprise Cloud.

• Repositories: Ruleset history, import and export are generally available: Import and export makes it easy to share and reuse rulesets, including our collection of ruleset-recipes to help get you started.

• Repositories – Enterprise rules and custom properties updates: Enterprise custom properties as part of the current preview can now be promoted from an organization to an enterprise property. Required workflows are now available as a new rule in the enterprise code rules preview.

Projects and Issues

GitHub's Planning and tracking tools

Changelog

• Evolving GitHub Issues (public preview): Following our opt-in preview last year, we are excited to release sub-issues, issue types and advanced search for issues to everyone!

Developer skills

General developer expertise based on our own experience and the collective experience of our customers and partners.

Blog

• How we built the GitHub Skyline CLI extension using GitHub: GitHub uses GitHub to build GitHub, and our CLI extensions are no exception. Find out how we built the GitHub Skyline CLI extension using GitHub!

Executive Insights

• The art of engineering team focus: less is more: As engineering leaders, we’re always being asked to get the most out of engineering teams. This is most often measured by what things we can ship, and how fast. But it can be easy to fall into a common trap: doing too much at once, convinced that more parallel work means more output. What if the key to shipping more is actually doing less?

Engineering

An inside look at how we’re building the home for all developers. Resources based on our internal experiences.

Blog

• How GitHub uses CodeQL to secure GitHub: How GitHub’s Product Security Engineering team manages our CodeQL implementation at scale and how you can, too.

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That’s it for the first installment of ICYMI - GitHub Enterprise Edition. Check back in to the GitHub Executive Insights at the beginning of next month to see key updates.