GitHub Copilot's Standalone Desktop App Goes GA — and Agents Now Discover Their Own Tools

TL;DR: GitHub shipped two June 17 updates — a standalone Copilot desktop app for agent sessions, and an agent finder that discovers tools on demand via the new ARD open spec.

Copilot Desktop App (GA): Available for macOS, Windows, and Linux, the standalone app adds things VS Code doesn't give you: start sessions directly from GitHub issues or PRs, run parallel sessions across multiple repositories, and schedule recurring cloud agent work that runs without your machine being on. Canvases let you and the agent edit the same diff, terminal, or browser session simultaneously. MCP server integration is built in. Download here.

Agent Finder: Copilot can now discover tools, MCP servers, and agents on demand instead of requiring a fixed configuration list. Describe a task in plain language; agent finder searches GitHub's public catalog or your private registry and returns ranked matches. It implements the new Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) specification, co-authored with Google, GoDaddy, HuggingFace, and Microsoft. No auto-installation — you still control what gets connected.

Why it matters: The ARD spec is a cross-vendor open standard for agent tool discovery. If it gains traction, the "which tools should be in my agent's context" problem becomes a registry query rather than a hand-wired MCP config to maintain — relevant whether you're using Copilot, Claude Code, or anything else.

Sources: Copilot Desktop app GA — GitHub Changelog, Agent finder for GitHub Copilot — GitHub Changelog