Copilot Coding Agent review when "Require approval of the most recent reviewable push" setting is enabled

[theophanemayaud]

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We have a repo with branch protection rules that require approval of 1 person other than the pr owner, before pull requests can be merged.
Also, we have the "Require approval of the most recent reviewable push" setting enabled, to make sure we just need one person to (re)approve if any last small changes are made to the pr after an initial approval.

But then, when it's a copilot coding agent PR, for some reason this turns into requiring 2 approvals other than the "pr initiator".
This is detailed here https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/use-copilot-agents/coding-agent/review-copilot-prs :

Additionally, if the "Require approval of the most recent reviewable push" setting is enabled, the final push to the pull request will require n + 1 approvals, where n is the number of required approvals. The person who initiated the original Copilot pull request can't be counted among the required reviewers for that final push—but if someone else requested the latest Copilot-generated change, their approval can count.

How does that make sense ? Why does a pr which usually needs 1 approval suddenly need 2 approvals ? In any case the person who asked copilot to make the pr doesn't count, so... ?!

This is preventing us from using copilot coding agent as we can't change our workflows to suddenly require 2 reviews instead of 1 just for copilot, which is mostly used for small cleanups/simple tasks for now. So it makes even less sense.
It feels like it's a bug/misunderstanding, because we really don't see what could be the purpose... Is it a technical limitation, to allow someone else to ask copilot to do changes and then approve that ? I would just say don't allow this, anyone asking copilot to contribute to the last change of the pr is disqualified from approving, but otherwise make it just 1 approval !!!

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[gary-hodgson-infotrack]

We have the same issue

[brooke-hamilton]

Here's an example PR that demonstrates this bug: radius-project/radius#10239. I am the person who interacted with GH Copilot Agent to create the PR. (I approved it, even though my approval does not count since I interacted with the agent to create the PR.) Another approver on the repo approved the PR. The PR is now asking for another approver in addition to the first approver, even though our protection rules only require a single approver.

Expected result: only one approver is required, as defined in our branch protection rules.
Actual result: two approvers are required (in addition to the person to prompted Copilot Agent).

In other words, it should only take two people to get one of these PRs merged. Currently, three people are required.

[peterkeating]

Running in to the same issue.