The News, Explained
On November 6 UTC, GitHub announced that its Copilot impact dashboard now tracks Chat and the dedicated Agents window in VS Code. Chat is where developers talk to Copilot. The Agents window is a separate place in the VS Code editor to see work delegated to AI. The dashboard now shows engagement for nine features, up from seven. Source Source
Each feature bar counts people. To appear in a bar, someone needs to use that feature on at least two distinct days within the last 28 days. Suppose one developer uses both Chat and the Agents window on Monday and again on Thursday. That developer adds one to each bar. Adding the bars would give two even though only one person was involved. Chat also includes agent mode within Chat when GitHub captures that use in its metrics. Source Source
Feature engagement and adoption phases follow different rules. Adoption phases group active users by the kinds of activity GitHub counts toward a phase. If the developer in the example has no qualifying feature use on two days, they can appear in both bars and still have no assigned phase. The dashboard renames Passive users to Chat-first users, while the rules and group sizes stay the same. The value in the reporting data remains No Cohort. Source Source
Teams that download 28-day aggregate reports for an organization or enterprise will see two new feature engagement entries: chat and vscode_agent. The field reference describes the original seven; the changelog announces the two additions. Reports covering periods before the change contain the original seven, so a missing entry for an earlier period should not be read as zero users. The usage metrics policy must be on. Enterprise owners and billing managers, organization owners, and custom roles granted permission to view Copilot metrics can access the data. Source Source Source
OYOPICK’s Take
For a team deciding where to spend training time, the new bars help show which screens people return to. If Chat and Agents-window use rise together, that gives the team a reason to ask what developers are delegating as they move between the two. A monthly report can show each bar separately alongside the distinct active-user count for the same 28 days. To judge whether work got faster or code got better, look at the actual changes and review outcomes as well. Source Source Source