After the introduction of Plan mode in Visual Studio, it now also found its way into VS Code. Planning mode, or as I like to call it 'Hannibal mode', extends GitHub Copilot's Agent Mode capabilities to handle larger, multi-step coding tasks with a structured approach. Instead of jumping straight into code generation, Planning mode creates a detailed execution plan.
If you want more details, have a look at my previous post.
Putting plan mode into action
VS Code takes a different approach compared to Visual Studio when using plan mode. Instead of a configuration setting that you can activate but have limited control over, planning is available as a separate chat mode/agent:
I like this approach better than how Visual Studio does it as you have explicit control when plan mode is activated.
Instead of immediately diving into execution, the plan agent creates a plan and asks some follow up questions:
You can further edit the plan by clicking on ‘Open in Editor’:
Or if you think the plan is good to go, hit ‘Start Implementation’:
Nice!