Microsoft is placing a significant emphasis on the reliability and refinement of its AI features within Visual Studio, aiming to enhance the user experience for developers. This shift in focus comes after a period of rapid integration of AI tools, including GitHub Copilot, into the integrated development environment (IDE).
Prioritizing Reliability and Stability
The company's roadmap for February highlights a commitment to "tightening core workflows" and "improving agent stability". This includes several specific improvements designed to address common pain points experienced by developers:
- Better Progress Indicators: Providing clearer and more informative progress updates during long-running operations.
- Improved Failure Handling: Enhancing the way agents recover from failures and retries, ensuring more graceful recovery.
- Enhanced Diagnostics and Logging: Improving diagnostic capabilities and logging to help developers diagnose and resolve issues more efficiently.
- UX Improvements: Revamping the user experience across chat management, history, and agent-mode interactions.
- Agent Skills: Adding support for Agent Skills.
- Unified Sessions View: Introducing a cohesive view for all Copilot activity.
Microsoft is also working on a dedicated Planning Agent to handle multi-step planning and execution operations. Furthermore, the company is exploring ways to better integrate the Copilot CLI into Visual Studio Copilot.
IntelliSense over Copilot
In situations where conflicts arise between IntelliSense completions and Copilot suggestions, Microsoft is prioritizing IntelliSense, ensuring a more predictable coding experience. This decision acknowledges the importance of providing developers with a reliable baseline for accepting suggestions.
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
For users leveraging the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Microsoft is focusing on making it easier to govern in a scalable and auditable way by implementing support for Client ID Metadata Documents (CIMD). The company is also working to improve how Copilot handles large and complex contexts, aiming to maintain speed and avoid unexpected behavior.
Community Concerns
While the focus on reliability is welcomed by many, some developers have expressed concerns that AI features are receiving disproportionate attention compared to other critical issues within Visual Studio, such as bugs and incomplete SDKs. There are also those who believe that the emphasis on AI is excessive.
VS Code Updates
Microsoft has released Visual Studio Code 1.109, the latest update to its code editor, which includes enhancements for agents, focusing on optimization, extensibility, security, and session management. New session management capabilities enable developers to run multiple agent sessions in parallel across various environments from a single view. A preview feature, Copilot Memory, allows developers to store and recall information across sessions, enhancing code search. The update also introduces terminal sandboxing, an experimental capability that restricts file and network access for agent-executed commands, and auto-approval rules for safe operations.
