Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

Feature: Strongly type Python events

Open
#1,016 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
python
Domain
api, developer-experience

Research direction

Start with the Python Data and SessionEvent definitions in python/copilot/generated/session_events.py, then compare the strongly typed event structure in dotnet/src/Generated/SessionEvents.cs and the analogous Claude Agent SDK types. Define how each event maps to its payload type and verify that Python type checkers expose the correct payload for each event without relying on the union.】【。

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement

Hi,

I was trying to build against the SDK in Python, and I got confused about which events carried what payloads. The Data class is a union of all possible data fields:

https://github.com/github/copilot-sdk/blob/f7fd7577109d64e261456b16c49baa56258eae4e/python/copilot/generated/session_events.py#L1773

SessionEvent largely a pair of enum and Data with a long docstring:

https://github.com/github/copilot-sdk/blob/f7fd7577109d64e261456b16c49baa56258eae4e/python/copilot/generated/session_events.py#L3229

Other bindings in dotnet, for example, strongly type the events, so you know what events carry what payloads:

https://github.com/github/copilot-sdk/blob/f7fd7577109d64e261456b16c49baa56258eae4e/dotnet/src/Generated/SessionEvents.cs#L134

I think stronger type hinting on the Python side would help make the SDK easier to consume by catching classes of bugs at IDE/Pyright/agent coding time. It has precedent on the Claude Agent SDK, which does adopt this pattern for its message type:

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-agent-sdk-python/blob/13f65c81e2bec2a5d1f1e1efdd45aa061c4ec43f/src/claude_agent_sdk/types.py#L1071

It's a breaking change to people using type hints, but I suspect we could do it in such a way that the only breaks would be people genuinely looking in the wrong place for payloads (i.e. silent bugs).

Dominant language
Java
Stars
10.5k
Forks
1.5k
Avg merge
1d 9h
Merged PRs (30d)
131

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from github/copilot-sdk

All issues in github/copilot-sdk

Similar issues

More Java issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.