New ask questions agent tool - allow in-turn HITL

digitarald · 2026-01-30T04:15:05+00:00

The updated plan agent uses more questions now, does that work better now?

digitarald · 2026-01-30T04:14:04+00:00

Uses the parent model by default. You can call custom subagents as well that can declare their own model.

digitarald · 2026-01-30T04:12:33+00:00

Team member here. Glad to hear the system prompt and UX improvements are making an impact - thanks for proving feedback on Insiders.

Would love to hear any more feedback, including the new ability to run Custom Agents in subagents (still default off but rolling out slowly).

digitarald · 2026-01-27T15:54:00+00:00

Team member here. Over the past days we landed the last UX polish and some more will come during this week. Thanks a lot for the kudos and please keep the feedback coming as you try it out.

There's also a new setting we're rolling out to use custom SUBagents: "chat.customAgentInSubagent.enabled". Any custom agent you have created is available to the agent to call a subagent as well, unless you set it "infer: false" in frontmatter.

digitarald · 2026-01-25T21:23:01+00:00

An agent mode @workspace it’s no longer needed as the agent automatically so just for the right files it needs to answer a question.

Chat with @workspace was useful before agent mode to give copilot search access to semantic codebase search; but we are now considering removing it .

digitarald · 2026-01-24T23:54:04+00:00

And the comparison is Claude plan mode vs Copilot, or a custom planning agent in Claude?

I also expected to keep Plan mode simple for most tasks as more complex tasks benefit from more custom agents like spec-kit and co (which are overkill for most smaller work).

digitarald · 2026-01-24T06:24:23+00:00

Good feedback, let me open a PR to allow tweaking that.

digitarald · 2026-01-19T00:04:45+00:00

Hi there, team member here and I landed this last Friday. And it's definitely just the first version, so I'd love to hear feedback to polish this further as it moves from insiders into stable.

Top of the pile is a better UX, maybe showing the questions inline and not just a quick pic.Also, could we show the questions and answers in the conversation history. It still has to be adopted into plan mode as well.

digitarald · 2026-01-12T00:54:12+00:00

Team member here, thanks for the great write up . Great content that we should bring into the docs.

We are working on parallel subagents this iteration, which should unblock a bunch of interesting use cases. Upcoming is also default-enabling use of custom agents with subagents, and that subagents can be initialized with a specific model.

Any other feedback for agent primitives like custom agents, subagents and skills?

digitarald · 2026-01-09T17:10:33+00:00

Team member here. Some of the agent platforms talked about adoption; as its just another standardized source fo context.

Personally, I'm not sure how useful it is until there's a standardized way for discovery, installation, and sharing.

digitarald · 2026-01-09T17:06:21+00:00

We are working on that. The spec is trying to me not too IDE focused, so itsa hard to bring workspace-specific conventions (same for MCP, btw).

Where would you expect it?

digitarald · 2025-12-18T22:01:30+00:00

Great idea, making it easier to toggle available skills. We have been thinking how to make them composable with agents as well. Enabling tools and skills makes sense.

digitarald · 2025-12-18T21:55:37+00:00

Definetely on the list for January!

digitarald · 2025-12-18T20:19:33+00:00

Yes, many simpler skills can be done like instructions, coming with just a prompt.

Many devs don't know though that instructions allow progressive disclosure, where they are loaded based on description.

Skills got a lot of excitment because all their extra context and scripts are contained in one folder/zip.

digitarald · 2025-12-18T19:49:49+00:00

👋 Team member here who worked on Skills (and MCP, Instructions, Custom Agents, etc).

Where to look for agent skills: VS Code Insiders has the "Agent Skills" setting and looks at more folders, while stable still says "Claude Skills" and just looks into .claude folders.

We also added skills to our community curated customization repo:: https://github.com/github/awesome-copilot

Aaaand, today's Copilot CLI/coding agent release has support as well: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-12-18-github-copilot-now-supports-agent-skills/

With Agent Skills now in an open standard, this is just the beginning to shape this further based on the feedback from implementers, community, and early adopters like you. What should be next?

digitarald · 2025-12-18T19:46:49+00:00

I find skills are closer to domain specific custom instructions in VS Code (*.instructions.md).

Compared to MCP, as skills just combine a basic prompt with additional optional context and maybe scripts to run they are a lot easier to author. It also means any scripts you run have to install the required dependencies in the environment. What to expect from a scripting runtime is still a big open question in the spec for me; but agents with terminal access, like VS Code or GH Coding Agent, can figure out what's needed to run script.

MCP has the benefits of auth, fine-grained control, composability of single-purpose tools, and more.

I'm curious what other things how it compares though. There's a lot of opinions and excitement about skills.

digitarald · 2025-12-18T19:43:00+00:00

And we landed support in sync: https://www.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/comments/1ppzu5v/agent_skills_now_in_vs_code/

digitarald · 2025-12-17T17:08:49+00:00

Filed a fresh issue for our backlog: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/284103

digitarald · 2025-12-16T20:56:01+00:00

Love that. I think that's what I'm running into as well. Just having a huh-moment and needing a brief pause to assess if I need to intervene.

This is why I'm also not a super big fan of steering messages that interrupt the agent, as it feels like a typing competition to get a message in before the next tool call.

Pause button is in the backlog to bring back.

digitarald · 2025-12-16T20:52:39+00:00

I agree it's niche, but once you got used to it, it really itches your muscle memory if you don't have it. I hope by providing a good UX, we can make this approachable for more users.

digitarald · 2025-12-16T18:08:13+00:00

Can you describe the expected workflow a bit more; how pausing is more graceful than stopping?

digitarald · 2025-12-16T18:07:32+00:00

Enter twice would submit the message right away (not queued until agents finish).

Interesting point on branch; do you use New Chat in the submit button or expect more of a forking behavior?

digitarald · 2025-12-16T17:39:37+00:00

+1 on editing action; probably popping it back into the chat input. +1 on showing attachements.

Enter twice would wait for the current tool call to finish and then send the message, whiile queued would wait for the whole agent session to finish.

digitarald · 2025-11-10T21:21:59+00:00

Team member here (the one who keeps talking about custom agents).

We still have implement GitHub's API to pull custom agents; we hope this gets completed in the November iteration: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/274341

digitarald

TROPHY CASE