GPT-6 Astra Just Landed in GitHub Copilot (Your Devs Have No Idea)

Show Notes

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gAOF__EhvU

GitHub flipped a switch on Thursday and GPT-6 Astra is now the default model behind every paid GitHub Copilot seat, but almost nobody has opened the admin panel to confirm it.
Playbooks + my answers, free - Church of SEO Jesus: https://www.skool.com/church-of-seo-jesus

What you get in the next 7 minutes:
- The 60-second check that tells you if your dev seat is on GPT-6 Astra or a model from six months ago
- The exact Slack message a non-technical founder sends their CTO tonight to force the fix
- Why Enterprise-managed settings, not the developer, control the default model
- The Sep 1 Copilot code review change that lets a bot approve pull requests on your revenue system
- The 4 model swaps GitHub pushed to Copilot in a single 7-day window

Sources:
- GPT-6 Astra GA in GitHub Copilot (Sep 4): https://github.blog/changelog/
- Claude Fable 5.1 GA in Copilot (Sep 1): https://github.blog/changelog/
- Gemini 3.8 Flash in Copilot (Sep 3): https://github.blog/changelog/
- Enterprise-managed settings default model (Sep 2): https://github.blog/changelog/
- Copilot code review can approve PRs (Sep 1): https://github.blog/changelog/
- Upcoming Copilot model deprecations (Sep 3): https://github.blog/changelog/
- Copilot admin panel: https://github.com/settings/copilot

Chapters:
00:00 GPT-6 Astra shipped in Copilot Thursday
00:30 4 model swaps in 7 days
01:15 Why the seat you pay $20 for runs the wrong model
02:05 Subscribe + Church of SEO Jesus
02:35 Live 60-second Copilot changelog check
03:40 Two agencies, same invoice, GPT-6 Astra gap
05:15 Verify at github.com/settings/copilot
06:10 Copilot code review can now approve PRs
06:45 Free Church of SEO Jesus link
06:55 The pattern: weekly audit, one admin panel

Audio edition of the Stewart Vickers AI YouTube video of the same name. Full transcript on this episode page.

What is Stewart Vickers AI?

The audio edition of the Stewart Vickers AI YouTube channel. Each episode takes one AI release - a model, a tool, a price cut - and translates it into money for business owners: what got cheaper, who got undercut, and what to do about it this week. Operator credibility over theory, specific numbers over vibes. Every episode links the original video and the free Church of SEO Jesus community where the prompts and workflows live.

GitHub flipped a switch on Thursday. Every developer sitting inside GitHub Copilot on a paid seat now has GPG-6Astr behind the cursor. GPG-6Astr shipped two days ago. Yours, right now. And here is the problem. Half the teams reading this are still running the default from six months back because nobody changed a dropdown.

I am Stuart and I run the channel that translates AI drops into what actually happens to your P&L. GPG-6Astr is the new default Modal living inside GitHub Copilot as of September 4th. 8 flash on the 3rd, and quietly marked older models for deprecation the same week. So the Modal your developer or agency is using today is not a fixed answer. It is a rotating If nobody has looked inside a Copilot admin panel this year, the seat somebody is paying $20 a month for is running a brain from a different geological era of AI. The headline answer before I show you the receipts.

GPG-6Astr is generally available inside GitHub Copilot as of September 4th. Every seat being defaulted to it depends on one setting under Enterprise Managed Settings, and the answer is almost always no unless someone actively went in and set it. The Modal does not auto flip. GitHub gives the admin the switch. If nobody in the org is watching the changelog, nobody threw the switch. The exact minute you finish this video, you can check.

I will show you the 60 second version. Then I will show you the one Slack message that forces the fix by end of week, without anyone getting their nose out of joint. No coding required. No CTO tantrum. Just a copy paste. One ask before the proof.

My channel covers every Copilot Modal swap, frontier drop, price shift the day it lands, so subscribe and the next one finds you instead of you finding it on next month's invoice. The exact commands I run in a second are pinned in the comment below. And the founder level playbooks for this stuff live in the Church of SEO Jesus, my free school community, link right below. Here is the 60 second check, live. I hit the Copilot changelog feed directly. The top entry, dated September 4th, GPG-6Astr is generally available in GitHub Copilot.

One line above it, the weekly release notes. One line below, the deprecation notice for the models it replaces. The whole Modal shuffle happens in a single week, and it is documented on one page that nobody in a finance team has ever opened. Then I asked my own Claude instance to write the Slack message and non-technical founder sends their CTO tonight. 102 output tokens later, three sentences that get the job done without sounding like the boss learned a new word at a conference. Copy it, paste it in Slack, the switch gets thrown.

Total elapsed time, under two minutes. Total cost, one Claude prompt, who just got undercut. Here is what is happening inside development agencies right now. The delta between Astr and what it replaces is not marginal. It is measured in features shipped PR sprint. Picture two competing agencies on the same street.

Same size teams, same tech stack, same monthly retainer. One admin threw the switch Monday morning while the coffee was still brewing. The other has not opened GitHub since March. Six weeks from now, one of them ships one more feature PR sprint than the other on identical invoices. The client on the losing end will call it culture fit or communication because the actual reason lives inside a settings page nobody thought to open. The gap opens this week, not next quarter, now.

And it compounds every fortnight the old default sits in place because the Modal gets better and the switch stays unflipped. Every sprint that goes by, the delta gets wider, not narrower. The winning agency found out about this from the changelog on Thursday morning. The verification, plain. com slash settings slash co-pilot right now and look at the default Modal row. If it does not say GPG-6 Astra, that seat is not on the Modal that shipped Thursday.

If you do not have co-pilot, message the one person you know who codes and ask them what their team defaulted to on Monday. The answer takes them 30 seconds and it tells you whether the shop shipping your product is on this week's Brain or Last Springs. Someone with admin permission has to go into enterprise managed settings and flip it and that person is almost never the lead developer. Watch what my Claude instance produced when I asked it for the five step admin check a founder can run in under 60 seconds without a technical assist. Step one, open the settings page while signed in with the work account. Step two, look at which Modal is marked default for chat and code completion.

Step three, if the rows are grayed out with a note saying managed by your enterprise, the answer lives in a different panel and the admin owns the fix. The whole check ends there. It takes as long as filling a kettle. There is a second thing in the same week that changes who signs off on shipped code and almost nobody has clopped it. GitHub also flipped co-pilot code review into a state where it can approve pull requests itself. Approve, not suggest, not comment, sign off.

It sits right there in the same change log dated September 1st, which means the last human check on the code that runs a business's revenue system might already belong to a bot in whichever repositories the team enabled the feature. If the product a company sells touches money or customer data, this is a decision to Mac on purpose, not one anyone should find out about in a postmortem. My advice for the viewer with a technical partner or agency, forward this video and ask one question back which repositories have co-pilot approvals enabled. If the answer is I do not know, the answer is likely more than zero and the fix is a 15 minute setting change. The Church of SEO Jesus link is pinned in the description if you want the full playbook and the admin checklists. The pattern from this week matters more than any single Modal.

The Frontier Lab that shipped the Modal behind a developer's cursor is now four separate companies. The tier that runs their models is a drop down menu one admin controls. The audit that used to be quarterly is now weekly. So back to the switch that flipped Thursday. Every hour it sits unflipped in a shop. A competitor is shipping one more feature that week.

The check takes 60 seconds. The fix takes 15 minutes. The gap it closes is measured in months.