The model picker is becoming a workflow picker

What changed

On September 30, GitHub expanded HydraFusion to VS Code and the Copilot app. It remains a research preview. Its choice is a workflow as well as a model: a direct answer, a draft that can escalate after a quality gate, or a draft with a separate model's critique and a revision.

Think of a workshop foreman

You would not send every workshop job through the same process. A familiar repair might go straight to a technician. An uncertain one needs a second look. A demanding one may need a specialist before anything leaves the bench.

That is the useful idea here: deciding how work should proceed is itself a job. A model menu asks who should answer. An orchestrator also asks what should happen before the answer reaches you.

Where the analogy breaks

A second model can share the first model's blind spots. A quality gate can accept the wrong answer. The workshop analogy explains the process; it does not establish the competence of the workers or the inspector. These announcements do not tell us whether the workflow will improve your own repository's results.

Who should care

If you are already evaluating coding assistants, this gives you a better unit of comparison: the whole attempt. Include the time spent reading, repairing and verifying the proposed change. Counting only the seconds until the assistant stops typing misses the expensive part.

A useful first experiment

Choose a small bug with a reproducible failure and a test you trust. Try your current setup and the preview on separate clean branches. Record whether each change passes, what you had to correct, how long review took and the usage cost you can actually observe. One task is a starting point, not a benchmark. Repeat before changing a team default.