Copilot Agents always rewrite PR titles/descriptions

[peterwwillis]

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Whenever you have a Copilot Agent working on a PR, and you ask the agent to do something in the PR, it rewrites the title and description. 50 different changes could have happened, but if the last thing you ask the agent is "update the readme", then the title and description only say "updated readme". I then have to ask the AI to review all added or changed files and write a new description, which is then way too long. Then I have to copy all that into a squash commit message. This is ridiculous.

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[DevFoxxx]

Hi @peterwwillis, I totally feel your pain. Here’s a quick strategy to handle this:

1. Manual Edits First: complete your manual code changes before asking the agent for metadata updates or descriptions to minimize overwrites.
2. Instruction Overriding: when prompting the agent, add: 'Update [X], but DO NOT modify the current PR title and description'.
3. The 'Draft' trick: keep your detailed notes in a local file or a Tasklist; the agent currently lacks long-term context persistence for PR summaries.
4. Use external LLMs (Gemini/Claude): if the agent’s summaries are too long or messy, copy your git diff into Google Gemini or Claude. They are much better at generating concise, professional squash commit messages and PR descriptions without the 'ridiculous' length issues."

[Jaiminkansagara1327]

Hey @peterwwillis, I’ve bumped into this too and it’s really frustrating when a long PR ends up with a title like “update readme”.
​

Two small workarounds that help me:

When I ask the agent to do something, I always add “don’t change the PR title or description, just update the code/files”.

If I already have a good title/description, I quickly copy it somewhere else so I can paste it back if Copilot overwrites it.
​

It would be great if GitHub added a simple setting to stop Copilot from editing PR titles/descriptions at all.

[shinybrightstar]

Welcome to the GitHub Community, @peterwwillis, we're happy you're here! You are more likely to get a useful response if you are posting your question(s) in the applicable category. Check out this Guide on how to post in the right category. It'll ensure your questions and discussions reach the right people faster!

This particular discussion belongs in the Copilot Conversations category, I've gone ahead and moved it for you. Good luck!

[H-Kigure]

以前の様に、CopilotがPRを自動で作成しレビューする形のほうが良かったと思います。
これはとても邪悪です。

[wenn]

Addressing PR comments

This is generated. It is pretty bad devex - it rewrites the original title/description with the latest commit, which provides very little context to what's going on in the PR.

[wenn]

Here's another example.

Orignal description

Copilot's low quality generated description that replaces the original.

[H-Kigure]

report_progress tool is evil.

[chrisclose-nib]

This 100% feels like a bug. If the idea in the case is Copilot as working as a pair on your PR, you wouldn't expect your pair programmer to take over the PR title + description like that.
Adding instructions into the copilot instructions sounds like a good fix, but it should be the default.

[jonapgar-mercury]

Will anyone repond to this?

Hilarious the GH doesn't have a proper way of filing issues with their software

[peterwwillis]

Your input will be carefully reviewed and cataloged by members of our product teams. 

Due to the high volume of submissions, we may not always be able to provide individual responses.

So they may or may not respond, and they may or may not fix the issue 🙃

[carlspring]

Will anyone from GitHub care to respond to this thread?!?!?!!? Is this some kind of twisted joke? I swear, this has to be one of the stupidest and absolutely most annoying things about Copilot!!! Why the hell does it need to keep updating the pull request title...?!

WHY?!

The title should be the same as that of the corresponding GitHub issue. If the issue's title is "Implement support for XYZ" and my last comment to the agent was to update the documentation, it makes absolutely no sense for it to change the title of the pull request to "Add documentation", especially, if this was a lengthy discussion with Copilot to get things implemented properly.

This really needs to be addressed. It's not a major bug, but it's an extremely frustrating one. I even instruct Copilot to not do this and to remember to not do this. It confirms it won't and then just goes ahead and edits the title.

I also don't get why if the GitHub issue has a clearly defined task list, Copilot doesn't have permissions to update it if it's assigned the issue. It should be possible for it to update the description with further findings as well as to tick off tasks from task list that was put together in the issue. I mean -- why would we care to have this or some weird version of it in the pull request instead? Just figure out the permissions model that will be required and let's have it done right.

[peterwwillis]

Oh lol is this still a thing? That's crazy. I stopped using Copilot long ago. Not only are the tools a complete joke, but Copilot subscriptions have the lowest limits for the price of any AI provider, especially since they closed the "long request" gap.

It makes no sense to use Copilot anymore. I highly recommend all users find better solutions elsewhere. (Not to mention more stable/reliable solutions)

[carlspring]

I actually think Copilot has come a long way and that it's now at a place where it's doing a great job! I am not impressed by their handling of the pricing, but given the fact that it's getting so widely adopted, it was expected that there would be such an exponential rate of usage and that this would lead to a much high demand for hardware and infrastructure to run this on.

I think that GitHub is very well positioned to implement all the guard-rails for AI agents.

However, it's also very important to sort out such annoying usability bugs when they are reported.