You're reading from The GitHub Copilot Handbook A practical guide to transforming the software development life cycle with GitHub Copilot

Product type Paperback

Published in Nov 2025

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781806116638

Length 290 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Tools

CoPilot

Concepts

Web Design

Authors (2):

Rob Bos

Randy Pagels

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Table of Contents (18) Chapters

Preface

1. What is GitHub Copilot?

2. GitHub Copilot Explained FREE CHAPTER

3. Getting Started with Generative AI

4. Choosing the Right GitHub Copilot Plan

5. Getting Started with GitHub Copilot

6. Mastering GitHub Copilot in Your IDE: Inline Suggestions, Chat, and Agent Mode

7. Going Beyond Code: Debugging, Terminal, and Collaboration with GitHub Copilot

8. Exploring GitHub Copilot Integrations

9. Collaborating with Copilot on GitHub.com: Issues, PRs, Reviews, and Coding Agent

10. Extending GitHub Copilot with the Model Context Protocol (MCP)

11. Getting the Most Out of GitHub Copilot

12. Navigating the GitHub Copilot Learning Curve

13. Building an Internal GitHub Copilot Community

14. Changing the Narrative: Reframing Engineering with AI

15. Unlock Your Exclusive Benefits

Unlock this Book’s Free Benefits in 3 Easy Steps

16. Other Books You May Enjoy

17. Index

What is the Model Context Protocol (MCP)?

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a new open standard that lets AI tools such as GitHub Copilot talk to additional tools and data in a consistent way. These tools can be anything from connecting to your work item tracking system to a design app to your cloud provider.

To be able to connect, an MCP server is used to spin up a collection of tools for the MCP client to use. This MCP client is an editor such as VS Code. MCP is only the protocol; the actual implementation runs on an MCP server, so your editor can talk to it.

The MCP answers three simple questions:

What can I read? An MCP server lists the resources it provides, such as acceptance criteria, docs, or recent exceptions, each named and returned in a predictable format
What can I do? An MCP server exposes tools, small actions with clear inputs and outputs, such as opening an issue or searching logs
How do we talk safely? MCP standardizes requests and...