GitHub shipped an experimental preview on October 28, 2026 that lets Copilot Fusion add eligible local models to its smart routing, splitting tasks between local and cloud models. I went through the announcement expecting the other half of the story to be an offline coding agent. It is not. GitHub says plainly that routing decisions are still made in the cloud.

Copilot Fusion is the model routing and task coordination layer inside GitHub Copilot. It looks at a request and the models available, picks one, and feeds that model's output back into the coding workflow. It answers which model handles a task. It does not move the workflow onto your hardware.

A model running on your machine and a coding task that survives a pulled network cable are two different claims. The first one is confirmed. The second depends on your specific setup. Three questions separate them. Who chooses the model. Which model runs the inference. What the tools touch when they execute.…