Unlocking More Power: Tool Calling in GitHub Copilot for Visual Studio

Have you ever been frustrated when Copilot doesn’t understand you? While it can’t read your mind, we’ve been working hard to make your coding experience smoother.

Previously, Copilot in Visual Studio could look at files in your repository, but you needed to specify the context of your code manually. We understand this wasn’t the most intuitive experience, so we’ve been working on a smarter way to infer information automatically.

Introducing Tool Calling: A Smarter Copilot

Tool Calling is here—a major update that changes how you interact with Copilot. Now, Copilot can automatically search for more relevant code or tools it needs to address your questions. This works with GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet.

You can now simply describe what you need in natural language, and Copilot can decide what of the information below is relevant:

Your current file
Open files or related files in your solution
Your whole codebase
debugger (locals, call stacks, etc.)
or Visual Studio itself

Web integration is also coming soon, allowing you to ask questions that span both local code and external data sources. (But for now you can use @GitHub.)

And that’s not all we added….

Smarter Knowledge Retrieval

Even more transparency and control

While Tool Calling is a significant improvement, it’s not perfect. To tweak any missteps, try the Retry button to generate a fresh response. You can also manually specify files, methods, classes, or entire solutions using # references in your prompts.

Help Shape the Future

Tool Calling enables both enhanced context retrieval and greater workflow automation. Please update to the latest version of Visual Studio to access upcoming features. We also invite you to try Chat again and share your feedback—let us know what works, what doesn’t, and how we can improve your experience.

Happy coding!