Copilot-Pr-Autopilot

# Copilot PR Autopilot

Drive any GitHub pull request through repeated rounds of Copilot code

review until the agent has done its job — every Copilot finding has

a reply from the agent (fix-acknowledgement, decline-with-rationale,

or explicit escalate-to-user hand-off). Remaining open threads, if

any, are deliberate hand-offs to the human merge owner — they're

not loop failures. Repository-agnostic — works on any repo that has

Copilot Code Review enabled, run from a machine with `gh` CLI

installed and authenticated (see Prerequisites).

When to Use This Skill

- The user asks to "request Copilot review" or "run a Copilot review loop"

on a PR.

- A PR is functionally complete and the user wants a final correctness pass

via repeated automated review rounds.

- A previous Copilot review on the PR has left open threads that need

triage, fixing, replying, and resolving.

When NOT to Use This Skill

- The PR is still under active design — wait until the structure is stable;

otherwise findings churn round-over-round.

- The user wants human reviewer feedback, not Copilot's.

Prerequisites

- `gh` CLI installed and authenticated against the target repository.

- PowerShell on PATH — Windows PowerShell 5.1+ (`powershell.exe`) or

PowerShell 7+ (`pwsh`). Both are tested.

- Copilot Code Review is the primary use case (`01-request-review.ps1`

uses GraphQL `requestReviewsByLogin` to trigger Copilot). It is

**NOT a hard requirement** — if `01-request-review.ps1` fails

because Copilot isn't enabled on the repo / account, the agent can

still drive existing review threads (human, advanced-security, etc.)

to completion by running steps 3–8 once as a single iteration; just

skip the trigger + wait. There is no auto-detect for "Copilot

unavailable" — the agent makes that decision after the trigger

fails (the script can't reliably tell "Copilot disabled" from

"Copilot enabled but not yet triggered" from API state alone).

Permissions: who can run the full loop

The full multi-round autopilot (steps 1 → 9 → 1) needs **Triage or Write** permission on the target repo, because GitHub's only public API for adding the Copilot bot as a reviewer (`requestReviewsByLogin`) is gated on that permission. Verified against the public REST + GraphQL surface in this PR's commit history — there is no public-API path for bot reviewers without write permission.

| You are… | What works |

|---|---|

| **Repo collaborator with Triage / Write** | Full loop: `01` triggers Copilot, `02` waits, `04`–`08` triage / fix / reply, loop back to `01`. Hands-off. |

| **External PR author (no write permission)** | `01` will throw a clear actionable error. Use `-SingleIteration` mode: address all current findings in one pass, then either click the UI 🔄 next to Copilot, **or** push a substantive commit (the `synchronize` event auto-triggers Copilot on most repos). Then re-run `02` to verify. |

In single-iteration mode the loop's convergence boolean is `Converged: true` iff `OpenThreadsAwaitingReply == 0` (the agent's side is done). The maintainer-side re-trigger then drives any additional rounds.

Every script dot-sources [scripts/_lib.ps1](scripts/_lib.ps1) which

runs `Assert-GhReady` on load: if `gh` is missing OR `gh auth status`

fails, the script halts **before any work** with a single actionable

error message naming the install command and `gh auth login`. The

agent should surface that message to the user verbatim and stop the

loop — do not retry or work around it.

Step-by-Step Workflow

> **The loop:** steps 1 → 2 → 3 → 4 → 5 → 6 → 7 → 8 → 9, then **back to step 1** if `Converged: false`. Repeat the 1→9 round until step 9 returns `Converged: true`; only then run step 10 once and call `task_complete`. **At every 10th round, the parent runs the [round-cap recap gate](references/09-convergence.md#round-cap--recap-gate-circuit-breaker) before looping back** — recap all prior rounds and stop if the loop has drifted out of the PR's original scop