Lesson 1 - Installing the GitHub Copilot app

The GitHub Copilot app is a desktop application for agent-driven development. It is built on GitHub Copilot CLI and integrates natively with GitHub, so your repositories, branches, and CI pipelines work out of the box. It’s designed for workflows where you direct several agents in parallel — each in its own isolated workspace — rather than doing all of the work yourself. With the prerequisites ready, the next step is to install the app and sign in.

In this lesson, you will:

install the GitHub Copilot app and sign in.
get oriented in the app’s main workspace.
try a quick chat to learn about the app itself.

Scenario

Your team is adopting AI agents to work through a growing backlog. The Copilot app gives you one place to direct that work — picking up issues, running agents, reviewing changes, and merging pull requests. This lesson gets you installed, authenticated, and comfortable starting a conversation.

Install and configure the GitHub Copilot app

Versions of the GitHub Copilot app are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Let’s install the app and authenticate.

In a browser, open the landing page for the GitHub Copilot app.
Download the app for your platform and install it following the instructions provided on the landing page.
Open the app once it’s installed.
Select Sign in to GitHub and follow the prompts to authenticate. If you use GitHub Enterprise Server, choose Use GitHub Enterprise and enter your server address when prompted.
After authenticating, you may be asked to connect a repository or local folder. Skip this step for now; you’ll create a fresh local project in the next lesson.
When prompted for a theme, select the one which brings you the most joy, then select Finish.

When you start your first session in the next lesson, select GPT-5.3-Codex in the model picker if it is available. If it is not listed for your account, use Auto.

Get oriented in the workspace

With your project connected, take a moment to learn your way around. The app organizes everything into a few areas in the sidebar:

Home — where you choose a project, configure a session, and send a prompt.
Sessions — where agents do their work. Each session runs in its own isolated workspace, so you can run several at once without their changes colliding. You’ll start your first session in the next lesson.
Quick chats — lightweight conversations for questions and brainstorming that don’t need a branch or workspace of their own. You’ll try one at the end of this lesson.
My work — your issues and pull requests, surfaced through the app’s native GitHub integration. From here you can browse and filter issues and pull requests, check CI status, start a session from an issue, and review pull requests — all without leaving the app.
Automations — saved agent tasks that run on a schedule or on demand. You’ll create one near the end of the harness.

Try a quick chat

A great way to get comfortable with the app is to use it to learn about the app itself — and a quick chat is exactly the right tool for that. Quick chats let you ask a question or brainstorm without creating a branch or worktree, so they’re perfect for a fast, throwaway question — no session required.

In the sidebar, select + next to Quick chats to open a new chat.

Ask the app how its own sessions work:

How does the GitHub Copilot app use worktrees?

Read the response in the conversation view. You’ll see that each session runs in its own isolated git worktree — the detail that lets you run several agents in parallel without their changes colliding. You can continue the conversation or start a new chat at any time.

Summary and next steps

Congratulations! You’ve installed the GitHub Copilot app and explored your workspace. You learned how to:

install the app and sign in to GitHub.
get oriented in the workspace.
use a quick chat to ask a fast, throwaway question.

Next, you’ll take a guided tour through the app’s core workflow by building and shipping a standalone space quiz. Continue to Lesson 2 - Guided tour of the Copilot app.