Introduction

  • 5 minutes

Code reviews are vital for maintaining code quality and collaboration, but they often create bottlenecks. Developers juggle long review cycles, inconsistent feedback, and difficulty providing actionable suggestions-especially across multiple languages and frameworks. Small errors slip through, and pull requests can take days to merge.

GitHub Copilot helps resolve these challenges by acting as a collaborative reviewer and assistant. It doesn't replace humans but works alongside them-catching issues, suggesting improvements, drafting summaries, and even auto-fixing vulnerabilities. You can also customize Copilot with your own review guidelines, so it looks for the same patterns and standards you care about as a human reviewer. This means Copilot not only accelerates reviews but also enforces your team's best practices consistently across repositories. The result is faster reviews, higher quality, and less cognitive load for teams.

Premium Request Units (PRUs) power Copilot's most advanced capabilities. Each time you ask Copilot to perform a premium-level task-such as reviewing an entire pull request, running in agent mode, or generating complex multi-step suggestions-it consumes a PRU. These premium requests give Copilot the additional processing power and context depth it needs to deliver richer reasoning, stronger best-practice checks, and more reliable outputs. Later in the course, you'll learn how to monitor your PRU usage, optimize your plan, and make the most of each premium request.

Learning objectives

By the end of this module, you'll be able to:

  • Explain how GitHub Copilot streamlines code reviews and pull requests.
  • Identify the key features Copilot adds to the review process.
  • Request and interpret Copilot reviews on GitHub.com and understand their limits.
  • Run Copilot reviews locally in your IDE and apply custom instructions.
  • Leverage Premium Request Units (PRUs) for deeper, context-rich analysis.
  • Automate Copilot reviews across repositories with rulesets and status checks.
  • Apply Copilot's suggestions responsibly, combining them with human judgment and testing.

Prerequisites

  • A GitHub account
  • GitHub Copilot enabled on your account (Copilot Pro, Copilot Pro+, Business, or Enterprise plan recommended for full code review features).
  • Basic familiarity with pull requests and code reviews-creating a PR, leaving comments, and merging changes.

A development environment such as Visual Studio Code or JetBrains IDEs (optional but recommended) if you plan to use Copilot reviews locally before opening pull requests.