Roadmap for AI in Visual Studio (February)

After a busy January (catch up here), we’re shifting focus to reliability and refinement. This month is about tightening core workflows, improving agent stability, and building on the MCP foundations we’ve been laying.

Agent Mode & Coding Agents

Reliability is the priority this month. We’re raising the floor on agent-driven scenarios with:

• Better progress and status indicators during long-running operations
• Improved handling of failures and retries so agents can recover more gracefully
• Diagnostics and logging improvements to help you diagnose and resolve issues faster.
• UX improvements across chat management, history, and agent-mode interactions
• Adding support for Agent Skills
• Coding Agent & Unified Sessions

Planning Agent

First steps toward a dedicated agent for multi-step task planning and execution.

• Dedicated Planning Agent built in

Copilot SDK & Platform Integration (Experimental)

We’re also beginning early work to better integrate the Copilot CLI into Visual Studio Copilot.

• Ways to surface the Copilot SDK’s harness/ CLI more directly in the IDE

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

MCP keeps external tools and services connected to VS in a governed, scalable way. February focus:

• Client ID Metadata Documents (CIMD)
• Visual Studio enables governance for MCP servers

Models & Context Management

Under-the-hood work to keep Copilot fast as context grows:

• Better handling of large or complex context
• Simplifying how context is reduced and capped to avoid unexpected behavior

Copilot experience in Editor

Smoother Copilot integration with existing editor behavior:

• Copilot keyboard shortcut to accept suggestion.
• Avoid IntelliSense and Copilot conflicts 
• Easier Copilot support from editor quick info

We’re excited for you to try these improvements as they roll out. As always, feedback is incredibly important—please upvote or comment on the linked Developer Community items so we know what matters most to you.

Thanks for continuing to build with us.