Copilot Fusion GA, Agentic Workflows GA and Agent Merge: October 29 Roundup

Most of today's news comes from one place: GitHub published 20 Copilot entries on October 28 in its Copilot changelog, tied to its Universe event. Meanwhile Claude Code has no release newer than 2.1.312, and Codex has only 0.166.0 alphas after the stable 0.165.0.

GitHub Copilot Fusion is generally available

Per the Fusion changelog entry, Fusion is a model option that routes and orchestrates models for each task so you don't pick one yourself. You choose an effort level (Standard, High or Max) and Fusion picks a workflow per prompt:

• Single: one model handles the task.
• Cascade: an efficient model drafts, and a quality check accepts the result or escalates to a stronger model.
• Critique: one model drafts, another reviews, and the original revises.

It is available on all Copilot plans in VS Code, the Copilot app, Copilot CLI and JetBrains IDEs. You are billed at each model's standard rate, with a limited-time 30% discount on model costs for paid plans. GitHub claims Fusion Max scored 60 on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, within two points of Claude Code with Opus 5.5 Max at about half the average API cost per task. That is GitHub's own figure, so test it on your workloads. Admins can restrict which models Fusion may use and set it as the enterprise default.

GitHub Agentic Workflows reach GA

The general availability announcement covers the GitHub Next project that lets you write automations in natural-language Markdown, compiled into standard Actions YAML. Typical jobs are issue triage, CI failure analysis, documentation updates and test writing. Agents get read-only permissions by default, run in a sandboxed container behind a firewall, and their outputs pass safe-outputs validation and a threat detection job. New since preview: self-hosted ARC runners, model routing by task difficulty, per-workflow model provider selection and micro-VM isolation. It is available on Free, Team and Enterprise, and the default Copilot CLI engine needs a Copilot license.

Agent Merge and Max code review

Agent Merge now runs in the cloud on GitHub pull requests. Pick "Watch and fix" in the merge box and Copilot works on failing workflows, merge conflicts or both, and it can pair with auto-merge. It needs a paid Copilot plan. Separately, Copilot code review gets a Max effort level in public preview, which runs several independent review agents across providers and reconciles their findings, aimed at risky changes like auth logic. Copilot approvals are now GA, off by default, and an approval is dismissed when new commits are pushed.

Other Copilot changes worth a look

• Copilot SDK becomes Microsoft Copilot SDK: no immediate changes for existing users, with package names and docs migrating in phases and no dates given.
• GitHub Enterprise now includes access to Copilot; check the entry for the plan details.
• Issue artifacts entered public preview and a security extension arrived for the Copilot app.
• Copilot Automations gained new tools, triggers and cost controls, plus VS Code management and outcome-based self-improvement.

Claude Code and Codex: quiet day

The Claude Code releases page still shows 2.1.312 (October 27) as newest, which we covered yesterday. On the Codex releases page, 0.166.0 alphas up to alpha.6 (October 29) have no published notes, so stay on stable 0.165.0 for now.

What to do this week

• Try Fusion at Standard effort on a real task and compare cost and quality against your usual model before the discount ends.
• If you maintain CI-heavy repos, pilot Agentic Workflows with read-only defaults before granting write outputs.
• If you enable Copilot approvals, restrict them to low-risk file paths first.

References

GitHub Copilot changelog · Claude Code releases · Codex releases · Copilot Fusion · Agentic Workflows GA