VS Code & GitHub Copilot Announcements with Burke Holland and Harald Kirschner

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Apr 4, 2025

Burke Holland, Principal Developer Advocate at Microsoft, and Harald Kirschner, Principal Product Manager for VS Code and GitHub Copilot, share exciting new features coming to VS Code and GitHub Copilot. They discuss the innovative agent mode that allows Copilot to autonomously create apps and debug code. Also, the Next Edit Suggestions enhance Copilot's predictive capabilities. The conversation takes a light turn as they share joyful moments outdoors, from camping trips to tech upgrades like AirPods, all while reflecting on their programming adventures.

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ADVICE

Version Control with Agent Mode

Use Git effectively before using Agent Mode in VS Code.
This allows easy rollback if Copilot makes unwanted changes.

INSIGHT

AI's Blind Spot: Terminal Commands

AI tools struggle to track changes made by terminal commands.
Relying solely on AI for reverting changes is insufficient; Git remains crucial.

ANECDOTE

Perplexity's Power

Burke Holland used Perplexity to find the correct Torx bit size.
It aggregated information from various sources, including YouTube comments, demonstrating its ability to find obscure data.

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Special guests Burke Holland and Harald Kirschner from Microsoft join us on this episode to share the new GitHub Copilot features coming to VS Code and beyond.

First up: agent mode is now available to all users in VS Code. GitHub Copilot gets a serious upgrade as it can now create new apps from scratch, handle complex changes to existing code across multiple files, run (and debug) tests from the command line, and guide you through its reasoning.

Additionally, VS Code and GH Copilot now offer MCP (model context protocol) for agent mode. This means that GitHub Copilot can use context tools and services while building an application. There’s a host of already available community-standard MCP servers available on github.com or devs can build their own and GH Copilot will be able to use it to enhance its knowledge and capabilities.

Next Edit Suggestions (NES) lands in GH Copilot as well, so when devs make one change to a file Copilot predicts the changes that follow and presents them in sequence. Not only are ghost-text suggestions faster to appear to users in VS Code, but Copilot is also better at understanding what other changes are needed to support the new code.

Special Guests:

Burke Holland, Principal Developer Advocate at Microsoft running the VS Code developer community team
Harald Kirschner, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft for VS Code and GitHub Copilot

Relevant Links:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - Apple AirPods Pro Gen 2
Jack - Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3
TJ - Trip to the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park
Burke - Insta 360 webcam
Harald - Springtime in CA

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.