Prompt-Driven Development: Building with GitHub Copilot Coding Agents

At Microsoft, we host a global hackathon once a year. It's a great opportunity for people to come together, experiment with ideas, and build things that might make life a little easier. Hackathons have traditionally attracted people who are comfortable writing code. You might have a designer or subject matter expert on the team, but sooner or later an idea would need to pass through a developer before it became a working feature. AI is beginning to change that. For our most recent hackathon, I worked with colleagues in different time zones to build an application using GitHub Copilot coding agents. Some of the people contributing weren't developers, yet they were still able to take an idea, describe the behaviour they wanted, and turn it into working software. The AI generated the code, but I wouldn't describe what we did as vibe coding. We had unit tests. We had repository instructions and skills. We worked through pull requests, and we used GitHub Copilot to review the changes…