MindByte Issue #122: AI Agents, Copilot Spaces & Free SQL Power

Author

Michiel van Oudheusden
June 03, 2025

In partnership with

Welcome back, tech enthusiasts!

Every week, I’m on the lookout for articles that catch my attention—tools, ideas, or announcements that challenge how we build, ship, and run software. Sharing them here isn’t just about news; it’s about helping each other sharpen our thinking and stay ahead.

This week, I found new ways to tailor GitHub Copilot to your own codebase, clever tricks for storing JSON in SQL, and the promise of AI stepping into the role of an SRE. Curious yet? Here’s what stood out.

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GitHub Digest

Turn Copilot into a subject matter expert with Spaces. This new feature, now in public preview, allows you to collect a set of data into a dedicated space, provide a custom instruction and use it to reason about the data.

The source data is in one or more repositories and is constantly kept up to date when you commit new data.

So try out the new Copilot Spaces functionality today and see how it can help you with your own data!

Introducing Copilot Spaces: A new way to work with code and context - GitHub Changelog

Today’s engineering teams struggle with fragmented knowledge. Having critical context scattered across code, documentation, and inside of team members’ heads can make it hard to get up to speed in…

github.blog/changelog/2025-05-29-introducing-copilot-spaces-a-new-way-to-work-with-code-and-context

Did you know that you could already add Copilot as a reviewer to your Pull Requests? And with the new changes, you can make this the default option as well. It even provides more and better comments on your proposed changes.

Copilot code review: Better coverage and more control - GitHub Changelog

Enhancements to Copilot code reviews: personal settings, improved comment quality, and expanded language support.

github.blog/changelog/2025-05-28-copilot-code-review-better-coverage-and-more-control

Coding Corner

Distributed systems are hard. So when you want to spread work over a cluster of nodes, this is not a trivial task. Seq, a database system to process Serilog data, uses such an architecture and the team describes in the below blog what is needed to operate such a setup.

Work Sharing in Seq Clusters

We've reviewed leader election and replication in Seq clusters. While these are tricky to get right, and involve nontrivial code, they're dwarfed in complexity by work sharing, which is the basis of Seq's scale-out functionality. Seq clusters ingest data at a modest rate over long periods of time, and then

blog.datalust.co/work-sharing-in-seq-clusters/amp

Azure Updates & Insights

I got the luxury of getting a very early demo of this new feature at the MVP summit, and I already liked the idea: an Azure SRE agent that proactively helps you running your software.

As the AI model has access to the telemetry, logging and settings of your app, it can provide all kinds of insights, optimize and even react to issues.

Microsoft is aiming for adding an AI agent to everything you are doing, so adding an AI agent in the role of an SRE makes sense as well.

Introducing Azure SRE Agent

Today we’re thrilled to introduce Azure SRE Agent, an AI-powered tool that makes it easier to sustain production cloud environments. SRE Agent helps respond to incidents quickly and effectively, alleviating the toil of managing production environments. Overall, it results in better service uptime and reduced operational costs.

techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/azurepaasblog/introducing-azure-sre-agent/4414569

Azure already has a number of free services, some forever, others for the first 12 months. Recently added are the free Azure SQL Managed Instances. You can get a General Purpose or Next-Gen General Purpose (preview) Azure SQL Managed Instance at no cost for up to 12 months. You can run 500 databases on such a service, giving you plenty of room to test out this DB type.

Read the announcement for all the features and limitations:

Free SQL Managed Instance offer is now generally available

techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/azuresqlblog/free-sql-managed-instance-offer-is-now-generally-available/4415664

.NET Nook

Not sure if you need a document database or a SQL database? Why not use both, as most database systems can provide the best of both worlds:

Storing JSON data in relational databases using EF Core

Learn how to store and query JSON data in relational databases using EF Core with real-world examples for PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and MySQL.

blog.elmah.io/storing-json-data-in-relational-databases-using-ef-core

Closing Thoughts

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