Use Copilot Agent Mode in Visual Studio (Preview)

by nsoonhuion 6/16/2025, 8:09 AMwith 14 comments

by jasonthorsnesson 6/16/2025, 6:02 PM

Instead of adding a TODO or filing a ticket to find again later agent mode/background tasks/agents let you just spin off the actual work for doing the task. So you can keep your focus on the main thing you are working on but have something else go fix the bug you noticed, write the missing test, or even just fix a spelling mistake in a comment. It improves code quality by lowering effort required to prepare a change and work through lint/CI etc. In this way it’s great even though it can’t handle much complexity yet.

by ComplexSystemson 6/16/2025, 6:05 PM

I have been using this with mostly decent results. I am curious how it compares to other IDEs though - Cursor, Windsurf, Roocode, etc. Any thoughts?

by jpadamspdxon 6/18/2025, 12:40 AM

Got this working in a preliminary way with local containerized environments for Copilot agent via https://github.com/dagger/container-use/pull/91. Going to fix it up, but could use some Windows wizards' support.

by recursingingon 6/16/2025, 6:39 PM

This is cool, but still lagging behind VS Code. I still can't the enterprise/premium models in VS (I can in VS Code) so no Claude 4 Sonnet. I even went so far as to try some C# dev in VS Code just to see how the Claude 4 deals with C# - Meh. In comparison, I just wrapped up a C++ microcontroller project in VS Code using agent mode and it was amazing. In retrospect I recognize that Claude will resort to grep and other text based tools. This works well when all the sources are included, less so with Nuget packages. If the models can aim better at intellisense tooling, they'd be more effective. IMO Copilot agents in VS are not quite there, but not far off.

by bionhowardon 6/16/2025, 5:54 PM

Who can take em seriously when cursor has privacy mode while copilot implicitly trains AI on copilot interactions with customers’ private repo code unless you get some enterprise tier of service?

The core of GitHub is about version control, including private repos, the fact they would violate that trust relationship just to chase AI capabilities means they’ve totally lost the plot as far as I’m concerned.

Maybe Copilot is a nice toy for open source projects or noobs working on private codebases who don’t take 5 minutes to read their website, but cursor just seems way ahead in terms of basic respect for customers