GitHub Copilot drops three models; push-event emails are gone

Two from GitHub tonight. On 16 November 2026 Copilot removes the Claude Opus 4.8, Claude Opus 5, and GPT-5.6 Terra models across every surface, with suggested replacements (Opus 4.8 stays for annual individual subscribers). And as of 15 October, GitHub's built-in email notifications for repository push events are retired for good — the fix is a GitHub Actions workflow that sends the mail yourself. Next week the board gets busy, led by OpenSSL 3.4 and the Minimus shutdown on 22 October.

Two entries tonight, both from GitHub — one looking ahead a month, one that already happened.

Coming 16 Nov: GitHub Copilot removes three models

GitHub has announced that on 16 November 2026 three models leave all Copilot experiences — Chat, inline edits, ask and agent modes, and code completions:

Claude Opus 4.8 → Claude Opus 5.5
Claude Opus 5 → Claude Opus 5.5
GPT-5.6 Terra → GPT-6.1 Sol or GPT-6 Luna

One carve-out: GitHub says Claude Opus 4.8 stays available to individual Copilot subscribers on annual plans, so they keep an Opus option; everyone else loses all three. Most people pick a model from a dropdown and will just see the replacement. The group to check is teams that name a specific model in an agent config, saved workflow, or integration — once a model is deprecated, requests for it stop resolving to it. GitHub says the suggested alternatives are enabled automatically for Enterprise and Business customers under default model enablement, unless an admin has turned off the global default or that model, in which case an admin has to enable the replacement in Copilot settings.

Reached 15 Oct: push-event email notifications retired

As of 15 October 2026, GitHub no longer sends the built-in email notifications for repository push events. GitHub says it shut the feature down to curb spam and abuse — recipients never had to consent before receiving these emails, so the channel could be used to push unwanted mail through GitHub’s infrastructure. The quiet losers are anyone who used push emails as a free change feed: solo maintainers, small teams without a CI notifier, scripts that parsed the mail. GitHub’s suggested replacement is to send it yourself with a GitHub Actions workflow on push through your own SMTP provider; the push webhook is the more robust option if you only need programmatic notice. Watch, @mention, and review notifications are unaffected.

The next few weeks on the board

Dates ahead, each verified against its primary source: OpenSSL 3.4 end of life and the Minimus shutdown (both 22 Oct), OpenAI’s GPT-4 / GPT-3.5 / o1 / o3 model removals (23 Oct), Kubernetes 1.34 end of life (27 Oct), Fitbit’s legacy Web API shutdown (30 Oct), Consul 1.22 end of life and OpenAI’s hosted Evals platform going read-only (both 31 Oct), then Alpine 3.21 end of life (1 Nov) and the GitHub Actions macOS 14 runner retirement, Mullvad’s encrypted-DNS shutdown, and HCP Vagrant’s end of support (all 2 Nov). Full board with live countdowns on the calendar.