Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Chris Reddington
Context windows, Plan agent, and TDD: What I learned building a countdown app with GitHub Copilot
Home / Developer skills / Application development Learn how I managed context to keep Copilot focused, used the Plan agent to sharpen vague requirements, and required Test Driven Development practices to catch bugs before users. January 20, 2026 | 14 minutes Share: In our last Rubber Duck Thursdays stream of 2025, I wanted to build something celebratory.
Building smarter interactions with MCP elicitation: From clunky tool calls to seamless user experiences
Home / AI & ML / GitHub Copilot Explore how MCP elicitation transforms AI tool interactions by gathering missing information upfront. September 4, 2025 | 7 minutes Share: When we build software, we’re not just shipping features. We’re shipping experiences that surprise and delight our users — and making sure that we’re providing natural and seamless experiences is a core part of what we do.
Building your first MCP server: How to extend AI tools with custom capabilities
Home / AI & ML / GitHub Copilot Learn Model Context Protocol by building a turn-based game server that shows how to extend GitHub Copilot with custom tools, resources, and prompts. August 22, 2025 | 10 minutes Share: Have you ever worked with AI tools and wished they had access to some additional piece of context? Or wanted them to perform actions on your behalf?
Debugging UI with AI: GitHub Copilot agent mode meets MCP servers
Home / AI & ML / GitHub Copilot Explore how I use agentic tools like GitHub Copilot agent mode and the Playwright MCP server to accelerate troubleshooting and debugging of UI issues, while revisiting the importance of clear requirements. July 22, 2025 | 10 minutes Share: If you’ve ever dusted off an old project and thought, “How did I leave things in such a mess?”, you’re in good company.
From chaos to clarity: Using GitHub Copilot agents to improve developer workflows
Home / AI & ML / GitHub Copilot Explore how you can set Copilot coding agent up for success with custom instruction and Copilot setup steps. July 15, 2025 | 7 minutes Share: Modern development often starts with good intentions: a quick script, a prototype, maybe an action to automate one small thing. But as projects evolve, those early efforts can become brittle. What if you could bring clarity and structure to those projects without slowing down your momentum?
From idea to PR: A guide to GitHub Copilot’s agentic workflows
I got into software to ship ideas, not to chase down hard-coded strings after a late-breaking feature request. Unfortunately, many of our day-to-day tasks as developers involve branches working on boilerplate code, refactoring, and the “pre-work” to get to the fun stuff: shipping new features. So I turned to Copilot’s agentic workflows to help speed along some of that grunt work.
Video: How to run dependency audits with GitHub Copilot
Home / Developer skills / GitHub Learn to automate dependency management using GitHub Copilot, GitHub Actions, and Dependabot to eliminate manual checks, improve security, and save time for what really matters. March 5, 2025 | 4 minutes Share: Every software project faces the inevitable challenge of dependency management. Over time, dependencies become outdated, leading to security vulnerabilities. Others go unused, needlessly bloating build times.
Supporting the next generation of developers
Home / Developer skills / GitHub Education Here’s your opportunity to empower the teen in your life to get a start in open source development. January 17, 2025 | Updated January 16, 2025 | 5 minutes Share: We believe that software is at the center of human progress and that all software builds on the work of others, especially open source, through an interconnected community of developers.
L'IA ou comment libérer la créativité des développeurs, à condition de faire les bons choix organisationnels
Le développement de logiciels alimenté par l'IA a fondamentalement transformé l'avenir de l'innovation. Notre monde est devenu dépendant des logiciels et les assistants de codage propulsés par l'IA permettent désormais à chaque développeur d'accélérer le progrès humain. Toutefois, limiter les bénéfices de l’IA à la productivité serait une erreur.
How to generate unit tests with GitHub Copilot: Tips and examples
Home / AI & ML / GitHub Copilot Learn how to generate unit tests with GitHub Copilot and get specific examples, a tutorial, and best practices. December 5, 2024 | 11 minutes Share: Developers writing enough unit tests? Sure, and my code never has bugs on a Friday afternoon. Whether you’re an early-career developer or a seasoned professional, writing tests—or writing enough tests—is a challenge.
How developers spend the time they save thanks to AI coding tools
Home / AI & ML / Generative AI Developers tell us how GitHub Copilot and other AI coding tools are transforming their work and changing how they spend their days. November 14, 2024 | 7 minutes Share: The arrival of AI coding tools is already changing the way developers work. Nearly all respondents in our recent survey said they’ve used AI coding tools at some point—and the vast majority said these tools help make it easier to write higher-quality, and more secure, code.
5 tips and tricks when using GitHub Copilot Workspace
Home / AI & ML / GitHub Copilot GitHub Next launched the technical preview for GitHub Copilot Workspace in April 2024. Since then, we’ve been listening to the community, learning, and have some tips to share on how to get the most out of it! & October 9, 2024 | 7 minutes Share: Can you believe it has already been five months since we announced the technical preview of GitHub Copilot Workspace?
GitHub named a Leader in the Gartner first-ever Magic Quadrant for AI Code Assistants
Home / News & insights / Company news This year, as part of its annual Magic Quadrant series, Gartner published a first-of-its-kind report analyzing the state of play in the AI Code Assistants market–and named GitHub a Leader. August 22, 2024 | 3 minutes Share: The vision behind GitHub Copilot is simple: augment the innate human creativity of every developer with a boost from generative AI.
AI-Powered Software Development Will Enhance Developers’ Skills
AI coding tools are not just for the production of code, they accelerate existing processes, help developers learn and drive innovation Chris Reddington, Senior product manager of strategy for developer relations, GitHub It’s no exaggeration to say the advent of AI coding tools has transformed the future of enterprise software development. Perhaps that’s unsurprising when you consider that 92% of developers already use them both in and outside of work.
From macOS runners to secure deployments, what’s new from GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions is not just your average CI/CD and automation tool. Integrated natively in the GitHub Enterprise platform, Actions adds the “flow” into developer workflow. Designed with developers in mind, GitHub Actions balances the extensibility and flexibility required to quickly and easily build CI/CD workflows, while also offering key governance and security features and compute in a range of sizes that scale with you as you grow.
How GitHub uses GitHub Actions and Actions larger runners to build and test GitHub.com
The Developer Experience (DX) team at GitHub collaborated with a number of other teams to work on moving our continuous integration (CI) system to GitHub Actions to support the development and scaling demands of our engineering team. Our goal as a team is to enable our engineers to confidently and quickly ship software. To that end, we’ve worked on providing paved paths, a suite of automated tools and applications to streamline our development, runtime platforms, and deployments.
Introducing auto-triage rules for Dependabot
Since the May beta release of our GitHub-curated Dependabot policies that detect and close false positive alerts, over 250k repositories have manually opted in, with an average improvement of over 1 in 10 alerts. The impact so far: auto-dismissal of millions of alerts that would have otherwise demanded a developer’s attention to manually assess and triage.
A faster way to manage version updates with Dependabot
When the next Log4j lands, you don’t want to find out that you’re several versions behind, and that it’s going to take the team days to fix all of the breaking changes. Dependabot version updates automate the patching process, giving you a measure of protection from unwelcome surprises. But just as with any inbox, the sheer volume of available updates can quickly swell into a management hassle.
Hardening repositories against credential theft
GitHub Security is constantly monitoring for abuse and security threats to GitHub, developers and communities that call GitHub home. In this blog, we are taking a moment to remind developers of some best practices and important defenses against common attack patterns against GitHub Actions. One common observed attack pattern exploits situations where a user’s personal access token (PAT) has not been properly and securely stored.
A checklist and guide to get your repository collaboration-ready
Want the TL;DR, or already been using GitHub for awhile? Skip to the end for a printable checklist that you can use to ensure that you’ve covered all aspects of making your repository collaboration-ready. My daughter has a pair of pet gerbils. They’re awesome, but not the most complex creatures to care for. They need their cage cleaned occasionally, their food and water refilled, and may need a neighbor to check in on them if we’re away for a while.
Release Radar · Spring 2023 Edition
It’s been a while since we’ve published our Release Radar. You can blame IRL conferences coming back, getting influenza, and being struck down by the weather. But those are just me problems. While I’ve been down or travelling, the community has been hard at work shipping new releases and new projects. So, we thought we’d combine the last few months into the Spring Release Radar. Sorry for those in the Southern Hemisphere—yes, that includes me—where it’s been autumn.
Moving from a product to a service mindset
Throughout the last decade, cloud computing has disrupted the technology industry and beyond. It has opened up new ways for engineering teams to build solutions and work with end...
Moving from a product to a service mindset
Throughout the last decade, cloud computing has disrupted the technology industry and beyond. It has opened up new ways for engineering teams to build solutions and work with end customers. Our engineering teams now have access to highly scalable infrastructure, the ability to rapidly deploy across the globe and, in most cases, the ability to pay for what we use rather than high upfront costs.
The economic impact of the AI-powered developer lifecycle and lessons from GitHub Copilot
Almost one year ago, we launched GitHub Copilot to the world. At the time, it felt like a leap into the unknown: We were introducing the first at-scale AI pair programmer to the world’s developers, and were cautiously optimistic. But now I am overwhelmingly confident in the promise of this technology. One year later, we have witnessed a sea change in software development. Today, GitHub Copilot has been activated by more than one million developers and adopted by over 20,000 organizations.
Survey reveals AI’s impact on the developer experience
Developers today do more than just write and ship code—they’re expected to navigate a number of tools, environments, and technologies, including the new frontier of generative artificial intelligence (AI) coding tools. But the most important thing for developers isn’t story points or the speed of deployments. It’s the developer experience, which determines how efficiently and productively developers can exceed standards, enter a flow state, and drive impact.
Survey reveals AI’s impact on the developer experience
Developers today do more than just write and ship code—they’re expected to navigate a number of tools, environments, and technologies, including the new frontier of generative artificial intelligence (AI) coding tools. But the most important thing for developers isn’t story points or the speed of deployments. It’s the developer experience, which determines how efficiently and productively developers can exceed standards, enter a flow state, and drive impact.
Developer experience: what is it and why should you care?
Developer experience examines how people, processes, and tools affect developers’ ability to work efficiently. What do building software and vacuuming your house have in common? Jonathan Carter, technical advisor of the CEO at GitHub, used to hate vacuuming. That’s because his vacuum was located on the first floor of his home and bringing it upstairs to the main floor was tedious. But when he realized he could simply keep the vacuum where he needed it, the task wasn’t that hard.
Applying GitOps principles to your operations
DevOps practices have helped demonstrate the value in bringing teams together to accelerate value for end-users. This typically includes automating build and release processes and bringing quality checks directly into the workflow. Fundamentally, these processes depend on some source of the truth. In GitHub, that source is a Git repository hosted on GitHub. Git repositories are great for this, as they allow us to store our code in a way that versions can be changed and tracked over time.
Inside GitHub: Working with the LLMs behind GitHub Copilot
The first time that engineers at GitHub worked with one of OpenAI’s large language models (LLM), they were equal parts excited and astonished.
How GitHub Copilot is getting better at understanding your code
To make working with GitHub Copilot feel like a meeting of the minds between developers and the pair programmer, GitHub’s machine learning experts have been busy researching, developing, and testing new capabilities—and many are focused on improving the AI pair programmer’s contextual understanding. That’s because good communication is key to pair programming, and inferring context is critical to making good communication happen.
How I used GitHub Copilot to build a browser extension
For the first time ever, I built a browser extension and did it with the help of GitHub Copilot. Here’s how. I’ve built a rock, paper, scissors game with GitHub Copilot but never a browser extension. As a developer advocate at GitHub, I decided to put GitHub Copilot to the test, including its upcoming chat feature, and see if it could help me write an extension for Google Chrome to clear my cache. I’m going to be honest: it wasn’t as straightforward as I expected it to be.
How companies are boosting productivity with generative AI
Is your company using generative AI yet? While it’s still in its infancy, generative AI coding tools are already changing the way developers and companies build software. Generative AI can boost developer and business productivity by automating tasks, improving communication and collaboration, and providing insights that can inform better decision-making.
Push protection is generally available, and free for all public repositories
At GitHub, we believe that by empowering developers with intuitive security built into their workflows, we can, together, shift security from reactive to proactive. Since the beta release of secret scanning’s push protection feature for GitHub Advanced Security users in April 2022, developers using push protection have prevented 17,000 potential secret leaks–saving over 95,000 hours revoking, rotating, and remediating exposed secrets.
Building a culture of innovation in your business with GitHub
Modern software engineering practices are essential to deliver value to your users. After all, isn’t that the promise of DevOps? A combination of people, process, and technology to accelerate delivery of value to end users? Value could mean many things. It could mean running a reliable service where your users experience limited downtime. It could mean accepting and prioritizing users’ feedback, focusing on features that they want to see.
Dependabot relieves alert fatigue from npm devDependencies
Over the past few months, we’ve made a number of improvements that make Dependabot smarter, quieter, and easier to work with, from pausing pull requests on inactive repositories to making alerts visible to more developers. Today, we’re addressing the alert fatigue problem with a new allow auto-dismissal function in Dependabot that safely reduces the volume of false positive alerts that can overwhelm developers and distract from legitimate vulnerabilities.
Breaking Down Silos: Applying Open Source Practices in the Workplace
DevOps plays a prominent role in mainstream technology and companies’ ability to deliver results. While the definition of DevOps encompasses the complete range of characteristics it covers, in practice, current tech culture tends to focus solely on the tooling aspect, neglecting the equally essential focus on the people and process critical in delivering value to end users.
3 benefits of migrating and consolidating your source code
In a previous blog on consolidating your toolkit, we shared strategies to help you simplify your tech stack, which ultimately helps developers be more productive. In fact, developers are almost 60% more likely to feel equipped to do their job when they can easily find what they need. But there are other benefits of consolidating and simplifying your toolkit that may be surprising–especially when migrating your source code and collaboration history to GitHub.
Building organization-wide governance and re-use for CI/CD and automation with GitHub Actions
Setting the scene A strong focus on automation can reap benefits, particularly in your development workflow and DevOps lifecycle. We know that continuous integration (CI) can help accelerate development and enhance overall quality, while continuous delivery (CD) and continuous deployment (CD) can help reduce time-to-production and test for quality in live environments (for example, API fuzzing, infrastructure-as-code [IaC] validation, performance and load testing, and much more).
Introducing self-service SBOMs
Following the precedent set by Executive Order 14028, security and compliance teams increasingly request software bills of materials (SBOMs) to identify the open source components of their software projects, assess their vulnerability to emerging threats, and verify alignment with license policies. So, we asked ourselves, how do we make SBOMs easier to generate and share?
How GitHub accelerates development for embedded systems
We’re living in a world where software and hardware are ubiquitous—even more than you might initially think! When you think of hardware, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Your phone? Your laptop? What about your washing machine or car? Or, one of the many smart home devices very likely scattered throughout your home? When you consider these embedded systems from an industrial perspective, the opportunities are endless.
Application security orchestration with GitHub Advanced Security
With the interconnectedness of modern software and the different types of code, you’ll often need to use numerous application security tools, each purpose-built to detect a specific kind of risk from a specific portion of your software. When integrating multiple tools into your workflow, you may find yourself trading off productivity–and collaboration–for security. That’s because different tooling, with different user experiences, can create context switching and inconsistency across how you test.
GitHub Enterprise Server 3.8 is now generally available
GitHub Enterprise Server 3.8 is now generally available. This release continues our investment in bringing more features to our GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) customers, whilst also delivering improvements for managing the GitHub Enterprise Server appliance itself. Here are a few highlights: The new GitHub Projects, an adaptable and flexible tool for planning and tracking work on GitHub, is now available on Enterprise Server as a public beta.
How to build a consistent workflow for development and operations teams
In GitHub’s recent 2022 State of the Octoverse report, HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) was the fastest growing programming language on GitHub. HashiCorp is a leading provider of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) automation for cloud computing. HCL is HashiCorp’s configuration language used with tools like Terraform and Vault to deliver IaC capabilities in a human-readable configuration file across multi-cloud and on-premises environments.
3 ways to meet compliance needs without slowing down agility
In the previous blog, Setting the foundations for compliance, we set the groundwork for developer-enabled compliance that will keep your teams happy, in the flow, secure, compliant, and auditable. Today, we’ll walk through three practical ways that you can start meeting your compliance requirements without having to revolutionize or transform the culture in your company—all while enabling your developers to be more productive and happy.
GitHub Copilot for Business is now available
First previewed in partnership with OpenAI in 2021, GitHub Copilot is the world’s first at-scale AI developer tool. Sitting within the editor as a simple extension, GitHub Copilot draws context from a developer’s code to suggest new lines, entire functions, tests, and even complex algorithms. Since its release, GitHub Copilot has transformed developer productivity for more than one million people, helping developers code up to 55% faster.
Passwordless deployments to the cloud
Security is top of mind for us all in software development. My colleague, Mark Paulsen, recently shared a number of examples to mitigate OWASP vulnerabilities while maintaining your developer experience and productivity. The security of the applications we’re building is important. But we also need to consider the security of the hosting environments that we’re deploying to. When deploying somewhere, you typically need to provide several pieces of information to enable the deployment to take place.
Not just flightless birds: How EMUs secure and scale identity and access management for your GitHub Enterprise
To understand what Enterprise Managed Users (EMUs) are and the value they can bring, we have to look back at the history of GitHub. In 2008, GitHub was created to allow developers to share their source code with the world. The primary focus was on sharing repositories quickly and easily. As the platform grew, organizations began to adopt GitHub and to build out a presence for their business.
Everything new from GitHub Universe 2022
Fifteen years ago, the first line of code was committed to build GitHub. Since then, our purpose has been to equip developers with everything they need to be their best. This mission has remained the same through every iteration of the GitHub platform. But as software continues to advance in all aspects of our work and life, running, maintaining, and building software for a global population creates immense complexity for developers.
GitHub Enterprise Server 3.7 is now generally available
GitHub Enterprise Server 3.7 is now generally available. This release continues our trend of bringing record numbers of new features to our GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) customers, designed to enable developers to build every day while providing administrators with tools to run GitHub Enterprise at scale, with reliability at its heart. Highlights of the GHES 3.7 release include: Reusable workflows and new support for Google Cloud Storage, making it easier to build with GitHub Actions at scale.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Chris
Contact Chris, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack