GitHub Copilot app use cases

[ronmichael]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Copilot in GitHub

Body

Can anyone explain some of the use cases for the new GitHub Copilot app? I just don't get it. I have a Max plan and use GitHub Copilot cloud agents a ton, and I've often thought that it would be nice to have a desktop interface for it, but this Copilot app seems to be something else. The app feels like a dumber, harder to use, and more constrained version of cloud agents. Rhe fact that it wants to work in worktrees seems odd and foreign as GitHub has never really embraced worktrees before.

Maybe I'm just not the target audience for it.

And PS -- the naming conventions for all of these products is utterly insane.

[addy0328p]

The GitHub Copilot App is essentially a local-first autonomous agent — unlike cloud agents (which run on GitHub's infrastructure and work on your repo remotely), this app runs on your machine and directly touches your local filesystem, env vars, private configs, and local tools that cloud agents simply can't reach. The worktrees thing is actually smart architecture — it gives the agent an isolated sandbox to work in without touching your current branch — just unfamiliar because worktrees are underused in most workflows. If you're already heavy on cloud agents, you're genuinely not the target audience right now; this is built more for developers who need an autonomous agent with full local environment access. And on the naming — fully agreed, it's a branding disaster even people inside Microsoft joke about. 😅