GitHub has released an agent mode and MCP support for VS Code, along with a new GitHub Copilot Pro+ plan with premium requests, the general availability of models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, next edit suggestions for code completions and the Copilot code review agent.

Copilot is GitHub's AI-based code helper system. It was originally based on OpenAI's Codex, but recently added multi-model support meaning developers can select from multiple models, including Anthropic Claude Sonnet, Google Gemini Pro, OpenAI GPT, and Gemini 2.0 Flash.

The agent mode for VS Code was first announced in preview in February for VS Code Insiders. GitHub is now rolling out agent mode in Visual Studio Code to all users, now complete with MCP support that unlocks access to any context or capabilities you want.  Agent mode is being progressively rolled out to VS Code and GitHub says it is aiming for full availability to all users in the coming weeks. You can also manually enable it now.

The developers say that from simple prompts, agent mode takes Copilot beyond answering a question to the ability to complete all necessary subtasks across automatically identified or generated files to ensure your primary goal is achieved. In agent mode, Copilot will iterate on not just its own output, but the result of that output. And it will iterate until it has completed all the subtasks required to complete your prompt, inferring any additional tasks that were not specified, but are also necessary for the primary request to work. Agent mode can also suggest terminal commands or tool calls and ask you to execute them. It also analyzes run-time errors with self-healing capabilities.

Alongside Agent Mode, GitHub has released a new open source and local GitHub MCP server, giving you the ability to add GitHub functionality to any LLM tool that supports MCP.  Model Context Protocol (MCP) is available in public preview. It can be used to provide agent mode with context and capabilities. When a developer enters a chat prompt in agent mode within VS Code, the model can use different tools to handle tasks like understanding database schema or querying the web. This setup allows for more interactive and context-sensitive coding support.

GitHub Copilot updates are available now.

More Information

Agent mode for GitHub Copilot in VS Code

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