Feature Request: AI sub-accounts for personal GitHub accounts

[smileygames]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Other

Body

As AI coding agents become more autonomous, I think GitHub needs a concept between a human account and a bot/app account: AI sub-accounts.

Today, a single human developer may use multiple AI agents or sessions to work on the same repositories. These agents may have different roles, responsibilities, permissions, and histories.

However, GitHub currently does not provide a natural way to represent these agents as separate identities under a human account.

For example:

My GitHub account
├── Lin (AI coding agent)
├── Lay (AI coding agent)
└── Reviewer (AI review agent)

Each AI sub-account could have:

• Its own display name and avatar
• Its own activity/history
• Repository and organization permissions that can be configured independently
• Its own authentication credentials
• The ability to create issues, pull requests, comments, and commits under its own identity
• Parent-account ownership and administration
• Easy revocation or suspension by the parent account

This would be different from simply creating multiple Personal Access Tokens.

Multiple PATs can separate credentials and permissions, but they do not create separate GitHub identities. GitHub still attributes the activity to the same user.

GitHub Apps and bot accounts are useful for automation, but they are not quite the same concept either. An AI sub-account would represent an autonomous agent that is owned and managed by a human account, rather than merely representing an application.

I think this could become increasingly important as AI agents move from simple assistants toward autonomous development teammates.

A possible model could be:

Human account
    ├── AI Agent A
    ├── AI Agent B
    └── AI Agent C

The human would remain responsible for the parent account, while each AI sub-account could have an independent identity, permissions, and audit history.

This would make AI-assisted development much more transparent and would allow GitHub activity to reflect not only "who owns the account", but also "which agent actually performed the work".

I would love to see this considered as a native GitHub feature.

[github-actions[bot]]

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[dereksantos]

I agree that this is missing. Today, the closest option is one GitHub App for each agent.

The app's bot is the identity, for example lin[bot], and it has its own avatar. Installation tokens expire after one hour, and you can limit each one to one repository and fewer permissions. To revoke an agent, you uninstall its app, and your own account does not change.

The missing part is the link to the parent account, so put that link in each commit. The author is the bot, Co-authored-by: names you, and a trailer names the accountable human.

My open-source side project, githug, automates this setup, including sub-agents under a parent. It is in open beta and free: http://github.com/githug-ai/hug