Skip to main content

Copilot Agent mode is GA- What has changed?

Microsoft is celebrating its 50 year anniversary and there are giving away a lot of nice presents. One of them is the General Availability of GitHub Copilot Agent mode.

I don’t want to repeat everything I said from my preview post so let’s first look at what has changed.

Remark: As far as I’m aware Agent Mode is currently only available inside VSCode and not (yet) in Visual Studio

First (small) change is that the UI has changed and that the 3 modes are now available through the same dropdown:

The basic functionality of Agent Mode in Github Copilot remained the same. So nothing extra to mention there.

Remark: If you are in doubt when to use what mode in GitHub Copilot check out this post.

Use your own models

One new feature I noticed that is not directly related to Agent Mode but was available in the same release is the possibility to use your own models. This can be a hosted model from one of the AI providers or a local model through Ollama.

For example, if we want to use DeepSeek in Agent Mode that is now possible. Let me show you:

  • I assume you already have Ollama installed and running. (If not, check out my post here).
  • We download and install the DeepSeek R1 model locally

ollama pull deekseep-r1

  • Open up VS Code and go to the Copilot window.
  • Click on the dropdown where you can choose between the different models.

 

  • Click on Manage Models.

 

  • Select Ollama from the list of providers.

 

  • Check DeepSeek-R1 from the list of available models and click on OK.

 

  • Now this model is available in the list of available models:

 


Remark: I noticed that although the model became available in both Chat and Edit mode, it is not the case for Agent Mode. I don’t know if this is a bug on my machine or that is just not available yet.

Extend your Agent functionality through MCP

Another nice feature that was introduced is that we can now extend the GitHub Copilot Agent functionality through MCP(Model Context Protocol). This extends the reach of what an agent can do or what information it can use in a standardized way.

Let’s give it a try!

First we need local MCP server running. In this case I’m using an example MCP server from Laurent Kempe that you can find here; aiPlayground/MCPSSEServer at main · laurentkempe/aiPlayground

  • Download the example code and start the MCP server:

dotnet run

  • Now open the Copilot Chat window and switch to Agent mode

 

  • Click on the Select Tools… icon

 

  • You get a list of already available and active tools.

 

  • Scroll down to the bottom of the list and click on Add more tools

  • Choose the Add MCP server option from the dropdown

 

  • Choose HTTP (Server-sent events) from the list

 

  • Enter the server URL and hit enter

 

  • Enter the server id and hit enter

 

  • We want to store this configuration only for this project so choose Workspace Settings

  • Our local mcp.json file is shown and the new mcp server is added to the list:

 

  • Click on Start to activate the integration:

 

  • Let’s now try a prompt that could invoke the registered tool:

 

  • As you can see above, the agent asks to use the tool. After hitting continue the tool is called and the agent continues his work

 

Nice!

More information

GitHub Copilot Agent mode (Preview)

Introducing GitHub Copilot agent mode (preview)

Agent mode: available to all users and supports MCP

AI language models in VS Code

Laurent Kempé - SSE-Powered MCP Server with C# and .NET in 15.7MB executable

aiPlayground/MCPSSEServer at main · laurentkempe/aiPlayground


Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Cleaner switch expressions with pattern matching in C#

Ever find yourself mapping multiple string values to the same result? Being a C# developer for a long time, I sometimes forget that the C# has evolved so I still dare to chain case labels or reach for a dictionary. Of course with pattern matching this is no longer necessary. With pattern matching, you can express things inline, declaratively, and with zero repetition. A small example I was working on a small script that should invoke different actions depending on the environment. As our developers were using different variations for the same environment e.g.  "tst" alongside "test" , "prd" alongside "prod" .  We asked to streamline this a long time ago, but as these things happen, we still see variations in the wild. This brought me to the following code that is a perfect example for pattern matching: The or keyword here is a logical pattern combinator , not a boolean operator. It matches if either of the specified pattern...
Read more