What happened
GitHub shipped Copilot for JetBrains 1.18.0, an update to how Copilot works inside JetBrains IDEs, the family of code editors that includes IntelliJ, PyCharm, and WebStorm. The headline change is what GitHub calls “assisted approvals,” now in public preview. When Copilot’s agent wants to do something beyond suggesting text, such as running a command, editing a file, or calling an external tool, it normally stops and asks you to approve it first. Reviewing the prompt gives you a chance to catch an unwanted action. With assisted approvals on, GitHub says “low-risk tool calls receive automatic approval, while higher-risk actions continue to prompt you for a decision.”
The same release adds a few other changes. You can now re-edit an earlier message in a Copilot agent session, and Copilot rewinds both the conversation and any file changes made since that point before it acts on your revised request. Organizations can now share skills and custom instructions across both local and cloud agent sessions. And Codex, OpenAI’s coding agent, which Copilot can also run as one of its agent options, now supports a plan mode: it shows you a plan before making changes, which you can review or adjust before it starts.
Before enabling assisted approvals, confirm which actions count as low risk, whether the setting starts enabled, and how to review automatically approved actions.
Why it matters
Approval prompts exist because an agent acting on your codebase can do something you didn’t intend, and the prompt is your last chance to stop it before it happens. Automating that decision for a category of actions is a reasonable idea in principle. Constant approval requests for genuinely harmless actions train people to click through them without reading, which defeats the point of having them at all.
Check both the approval criteria and the action history. If an action runs automatically, its effects still need review. A missing history would make that review harder, so establish what the installed plugin records before depending on automatic approval.
Claire Vo’s hands-on account of Meta’s Muse described its permission design alongside Claude Code and Codex. Permission controls vary between tools, so confirm how your agent handles approval.
Who should care
Anyone running Copilot’s agent inside a JetBrains editor, especially if you’ve come to rely on the approval prompt as your signal to stop and read what the agent is about to do.
What builders should do next
After you’re on 1.18.0, use a disposable project with no real credentials and run two separate agent sessions. In one, ask for something you’d call routine, like listing files in a folder or reading a config file. In the other, ask for something you’d call risky, like deleting a disposable test file or writing to a local test database that has no production connection. Watch whether assisted approvals stays out of the way for the first and still stops you for the second. Then check your JetBrains settings for where this preview toggle lives, and look for a log or history that shows what got auto-approved during the session. If you cannot find a visible approval history, weigh that gap before enabling the preview for routine sessions.
End of article