September 23, 2026: GitHub announced Copilot for JetBrains 1.18.0 on September 22, introducing assisted approvals in public preview for Copilot agent sessions. Low-risk tool calls can proceed automatically; higher-risk actions still ask the user to decide. GitHub’s release announcement describes the change.
What changed
The update also lets users edit an earlier message after rewinding the conversation and file changes. Copilot agent sessions gain persistent controls for individual MCP tools. A separate switch disables the built-in GitHub MCP Server without changing manually configured servers; the built-in server stays enabled by default.
These changes give teams more control over how agents act inside the IDE. The announcement does not enumerate which commands qualify as low risk, so teams should validate behavior against their own workflows.
Why this matters for QA engineers
QA analysis: Agent-assisted test maintenance often combines reading failure logs, editing assertions and running commands. Approval behavior is now another part of that workflow to evaluate. In a disposable test repository, record which actions run automatically and which pause for a decision. Check that rejecting an action prevents its execution, and verify that disabled MCP tools remain disabled after reopening a session.
For conversation rewind, compare the actual working-tree diff before and after revising a request. Keep generated test changes subject to review and run the regression suite: fewer approval prompts do not establish that a proposed fix is correct.
Source and availability
This is a public-preview feature in the 1.18.0 release, not a claim that every agent action is automatically approved. Source: GitHub Changelog, September 22, 2026, verified September 23.