Stacked pull requests are now generally available on GitHub. The shift matters as coding agents make large changes faster than humans can safely review them: teams can keep one coherent change dependency-ordered while reviewing it as smaller PRs.
The useful boundary change is that Copilot can now cross from code and terminals into ordinary desktop interfaces, with per-app approval and organisation-level controls.
GitHub’s credential-response story now has both discovery and containment: enterprise owners can export SSH keys, PATs, OAuth and GitHub App tokens with ownership, scope and last-use metadata, then use selective revocation rather than invalidating every credential a user holds.
The useful part is not the 800,000-line headline. GitHub has published unusually detailed receipts for a production-scale agent-assisted migration: roughly $120,000 of token spend, 14.5 weeks of incremental releases, dozens of regressions, extensive compatibility tests and a workload-specific jump from 7.55 to 120 session lifecycles per second.
GitHub Actions now has enforceable actor and event rules before a workflow starts, plus a coming default block for a trigger that can expose repository secrets to untrusted fork code.
GitHub-hosted Actions jobs that use `ubuntu-latest` are about to change operating-system generation without a YAML edit; teams can test on `ubuntu-26.04` now or pin 24.04 while they migrate.
The scanner itself is not the new part. The September 16 change removes the CodeQL-default-setup gate that GitHub’s July rollout originally required, making AI-assisted vulnerability detection easier to add to repositories with different code-scanning configurations.
The deadline is no longer theoretical: browsers, Git HTTPS backends and API clients that still depend on SHA-1-era TLS algorithms can now lose connectivity to GitHub.com.
The material change is that model routing is no longer a single opaque optimization target. Developers can now tell Copilot whether to bias Auto toward lower cost, a middle ground or higher quality while GitHub still chooses a model prompt by prompt.
GitHub Spark stops being available to existing users on August 31, 2026. Deployed apps are meant to keep running, but owners should export code to a repository now; Spark apps using `llm()` need a separate inference provider because the underlying GitHub Models service retired July 30.
The change turns cache poisoning from mostly a workflow-design warning into an enforceable permission boundary. Teams can let untrusted jobs restore caches without writing them, prevent reusable workflows from escalating cache access and isolate jobs that only need to publish cache entries.
The useful change is where enforcement happens. Teams can now make unresolved leaked credentials a branch-policy failure, with organization and enterprise rollout plus API configuration for large repository fleets.
Teams with pinned, custom-image or auto-update-disabled GitHub Actions runners can now see registration or job execution fail before the September 25 cutoff. The migration is not just a one-time jump to v2.329.0: already-registered runners must also stay within 30 days of the latest runner release.
Repository growth tools can measure when star counts changed again without rebuilding individual-user histories. The new API deliberately separates aggregate popularity data from stargazer identity, so integrations need to distinguish trend analytics from user-level community data.
Copilot code review now moves from advisory assessment toward a governed merge gate. The public preview remains off by default, and GitHub’s current docs let administrators separate AI approval itself from whether that approval counts toward required-review policy.
The CLI itself is not being deprecated. The risk is narrower and operational: stale Linux repository keyrings can stop package installs or updates from verifying after the old signing key expires.
GitHub Copilot can now turn Slack or Teams threads into collaborative cloud-agent sessions. Teammates can add context and steer the work in public, while repository permissions, agent budgets and optional extra PR approvals remain the main control boundaries.
GitHub OAuth apps can now use eight-hour access tokens with rotating refresh tokens, register up to 10 callback URLs, and explicitly control wildcard callback matching. New apps default to expiring tokens, while existing single-callback apps should review a legacy wildcard setting GitHub has now made visible.
GitHub Issues now gives agent automations confidence levels, rationales and optional approvals, letting teams automate routine triage while holding uncertain changes for review.
Stripe Radar Standard, Plus and Pro merchants need to recheck renewal-screening settings and invoice volume. Radar Lite remains included with standard processing, and only transactions actually screened incur paid-tier screening fees.