VS Code Live: Agent Sessions Day

Quick Overview

VS Code Agent Sessions Day showcases significant advancements in multi-agent development within VS Code, allowing developers like PMs and engineers to delegate complex tasks across local, background, and cloud agents for increased velocity, better decision-making through parallel task execution, and automated workflows like issue triaging and code review.

Key Points: Copilot Pro Plus and Enterprise users can now run Claude, Codex, and GitHub Copilot as coding agents on GitHub, VS Code, and GitHub mobile, offering 'three frontier agents, one subscription.' The Agent Sessions view acts as a 'single pane of glass' for managing local, background, and cloud agents simultaneously, enabling developers to compare competing approaches to a task. The VS Code team uses AI extensively for adjacent tasks, such as Harold using a Dogfood agent with Playwright to critically review generated slides from a learner's perspective, documenting rough edges. Custom agents and skills integrate tools like Work IQ (for meeting summaries) and GitHub actions/Chrome extensions for automating issue grooming, including duplicate detection and owner assignment with confidence scores. The team emphasizes a new operating model: 'Stay hands on locally for visual and exploratory work. Delegate clear longer running tasks to background and cloud,' addressing developer anxiety about waiting for results. PMs are shifting from writing long specs to creating prototypes or PRs, exemplified by a PM sending a PR for a feature idea which was iterated on with engineering feedback and merged, drastically changing the feedback loop. Automated processes include Copilot Code Review Agent (CCR) automatically reviewing new PRs in a dedicated Slack channel, requiring engineers to resolve its comments before final review proceeds.

Context: The video captures 'VS Code Live: Agent Sessions Day,' an event focused on demonstrating the evolution of multi-agent development capabilities integrated directly into Visual Studio Code and the broader GitHub ecosystem. Key participants include hosts Burke and Olivia, and speakers like Kyle Daigle (CEO of GitHub) and Harold Kershner, who showcase how developers, product managers (PMs), and engineers are using these new agent features for daily tasks, ranging from feature development to administrative overhead reduction.