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

Front-End Fire

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:

• VS Code Timeline view
• Burke’s Website
• Burke on GitHub
• Burke on Twitter
• Burke on YouTube
• Burke on TikTok
• Burke on LinkedIn
• Harald’s Website
• Harald on GitHub
• Harald on Twitter
• Harald on LinkedIn

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

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