GitHub Copilot Arrives in Xcode's Coding Assistant and JetBrains Air
GitHub shipped two integrations that put Copilot inside other vendors' agent surfaces instead of its own extensions. On November 4, Copilot became available in Xcode's built-in coding assistant in public preview, starting with Xcode 27.3 beta on macOS Tahoe 26.6 or later. It is set up under Xcode > Settings > Intelligence and works with every Copilot plan. It sits next to the existing GitHub Copilot for Xcode extension rather than replacing it.
A day earlier, Copilot became an agent inside JetBrains Air via the Agent Client Protocol (ACP). It supports local tasks in a JetBrains IDE and cloud tasks through Air Teams, which run in a Docker container on a fresh VM. Both are billed to the user's Copilot subscription rather than JetBrains AI credits. Air administrators can disable Copilot by governance policy, but they cannot set Copilot spend limits from Air.
The JetBrains integration is another sign that ACP is becoming the standard socket for coding agents in editors, the way LSP did for language tooling. GitHub's weekly release notes for the same week also list VS Code 1.145 (chat view modes, remote browser preview, cron expressions for local automations), a unified /settings dashboard in Copilot CLI, and Agent Merge setup directly from a pull request in the Copilot app.
Read more — GitHub Changelog
@GitHub in Slack and Microsoft Teams Is Generally Available
The @GitHub bot for Slack and Microsoft Teams reached general availability on November 6. From a conversation, it can investigate bugs, create issues, implement changes and open pull requests, using the thread as context so a team discussion can turn into a tracked change without switching tools.
The GA release adds Canvas support in Teams for reviewing plans and code inline, automatic repository detection from the message content, and attribution on created issues and PRs ("Created from a Slack/Teams conversation with @username"). The attribution helps audits, because agent-authored PRs can be traced back to the conversation and person that requested them.
Read more — GitHub Changelog
Claude Code 2.1.317–2.1.319: Background MCP Tasks and Deny-Instead-of-Prompt
Claude Code shipped three releases this week. Version 2.1.319 (November 6) moves an MCP tool call to the background when the server runs it as an MCP task and reports the result when it finishes. Opt out with CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_MCP_TASK_BACKGROUND, or disable MCP tasks entirely with CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_MCP_TASKS=1. A new permissions.denyInsteadOfPrompting setting denies any tool call that would otherwise wait on a permission prompt and lets the turn continue. That is useful for unattended terminal sessions, subagents and teammates that should never block.
The same release adds /claude-api latency-optimize and a CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_FEATURE_FLAGS variable that stops feature-flag fetching without disabling telemetry. Auto mode now asks about or denies calls it cannot check with the server when telemetry or flags are off, which includes setups behind LLM gateways. CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_MODE_SERVER=0 restores the built-in classifier. A self-paced /loop now ends when a turn finishes without rescheduling.
Version 2.1.318 (November 4) adds loginExpiresAt to claude auth status and credential_expires_at to claude -p JSON output, and stops auto-installing the IDE extension when launched from an IDE terminal. Version 2.1.317 (November 3) prompts before a web or shell tool call sends the account email address to the network, adds onFailure: "block" for Agent SDK hook callbacks, and adds a cost report endpoint to the Claude apps gateway admin API.
Read more — Claude Code Changelog
Codex CLI 0.167.0 Adds an Agent Command Center
OpenAI released Codex CLI 0.167.0 on November 6. The headline feature is codex agents --no-daemon, which opens an agent command center listing running and finished agent tasks, with unread results marked. Users can also switch between connected backends from the terminal session picker without losing drafts, and preview local image attachments while composing.
Sign-in alternatives now sit under "Sign in another way". A gcp_setup_wizard flag configures Google Cloud Vertex AI as a provider with Application Default Credentials or a credential file, following the Vertex provider added in 0.165. There is also experimental opt-in support for macOS and Windows system proxy settings. Fixes include Ctrl+L clearing the display while keeping history reachable via Ctrl+T, and network approval prompts resolving when their underlying requests end.
Read more — OpenAI Codex (GitHub)
Microsoft 365 Copilot: Cowork Drives Your Local Edge, Admins Get an Agents Usage Report
Microsoft's November 4 release notes, covering October 28 to November 3, include several agent-related changes. Copilot Cowork can now use the user's local Microsoft Edge to complete web steps in a separate tab, using existing signed-in sessions while credentials stay on the device. That pattern resembles browser-use agents in other assistants, and it is worth reviewing against your organization's browser policies.
For administrators, the Microsoft 365 admin center adds an agents usage report for Copilot and Copilot Chat, segmented by licensed vs. unlicensed users and by publisher type. Admins can also designate up to 100 SharePoint sites as authoritative content for Copilot Search. Other items include a SharePoint list agent that generates Microsoft Lists schemas from natural-language prompts, a HubSpot connector for Researcher, PowerPoint creating decks that reuse an attached presentation's theme, and Copilot-powered scheduled prompts in the Teams Workflows app (off by default).
Read more — Microsoft Learn
Hermes Agent v0.23.0 "The Hearth Release" Runs the Desktop Workspace in a Browser
NousResearch released Hermes Agent v0.23.0 on November 5. Its main feature is a Webapp that serves the full Desktop workspace in a browser tab from the user's own gateway. It is off by default and enabled via webapp.enabled or Web Access in Settings. Architecturally, one gateway now owns every session, so the CLI, TUI, Desktop, ACP editors, chat bots and cron jobs all attach to it as clients.
Other additions include /rewind (press Esc twice), inline images in the terminal, pluggable delegation via delegation.backend with an official advanced-delegation plugin, hermes plugins update with opt-in auto-update, and price tags and spend limits for paid MCP tools. GLM-5.3 is now the default model, and the plugin catalog grew from about 600 to over 1,050 entries.
There are breaking changes to check before upgrading. The old built-in browser tools are gone in favor of browser_exec, hermes mcp serve is renamed to hermes mcp-serve, Desktop requires macOS 13+ or 64-bit Windows, and built-in skills shrank from 58 to 44 as the Word, PowerPoint and Excel skills merged into a single microsoft-office skill.
Read more — NousResearch (GitHub)
Google DeepMind Releases Cheminformatics Skills for Antigravity
Google DeepMind published Cheminformatics Skills for Google Antigravity, an agent skill pack grounded in the RDKit toolkit and connected to the ChEMBL and PubChem databases. The walkthrough has the agent rigidify the kinase inhibitor crizotinib into lorlatinib-style macrocycles. Along the way, the agent retrieved thousands of compounds, curated 568 into a dashboard, ran matched molecular pair analysis, and trained a potency model using scaffold splits to avoid leakage.
The skills are available now through Antigravity's Science plugin, and Google is offering 10,000 scientists the highest usage tier free for six months. The post notes that generated designs still need experimental validation. For developers, it is a worked example of domain skills: deterministic, well-tested libraries wrapped as agent tools so the model orchestrates them instead of making up chemistry.
Read more — Google DeepMind
Links & Sources
- GitHub Copilot is now available in JetBrains Air
- GitHub Copilot is now available in Xcode's coding assistant
- GitHub Copilot weekly releases — November 2
- @GitHub in Slack and Teams is generally available
- Claude Code Changelog
- Codex CLI 0.167.0
- Microsoft 365 Copilot release notes
- Hermes Agent v0.23.0
- Agentic cheminformatics with Google Antigravity
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