Vibe coding with GitHub Copilot: Agent mode and MCP suppo...
Thomas Dohmke·2025-04-05·via The latest product news from GitHub - The GitHub Blog
Allow us to reintroduce ourselves: GitHub Copilot is getting a whole lot more agentic with increased context of your tools and services, powered by the world’s leading models, starting today. 👏
We are excited to roll out agent mode in Visual Studio Code to all users, now complete with MCP support that unlocks access to any context or capabilities you want. What’s more, we are thrilled to release a new open source and local GitHub MCP server, giving you the ability to add GitHub functionality to any LLM tool that supports MCP. 🤖
In keeping with our commitment to offer multi-model choice, we’re making Anthropic Claude 3.5, 3.7 Sonnet, 3.7 Sonnet Thinking, Google Gemini 2.0 Flash, and OpenAI o3-mini generally available via premium requests, included in all paid Copilot tiers. These premium requests are in addition to unlimited requests for agent mode, context-driven chat, and code completions that all paid plans have when using our base model (👀 more below). With the new Pro+ tier, individual developers get the most out of the latest models with Copilot.
The agent awakening doesn’t stop there. We are also announcing the general availability of the Copilot code review agent. Plus, the general availability of next edit suggestions so you can tab tab tab your way to coding glory. 🏆
Agent mode in VS Code
Agent mode is progressively rolling out to VS Code users in stable, as we aim for full availability to all users in the coming weeks. You can also manually enable it now. Compared to chat or multi-file edits, which allow you to propose code changes across multiple files in your workspace, agent mode is fundamentally capable of taking action to translate your ideas into code. With simple prompts, agent mode takes Copilot beyond answering a question, instead completing all necessary subtasks across automatically identified or generated files to ensure your primary goal is achieved. Agent mode can suggest terminal commands or tool calls and ask you to execute them. It also analyzes run-time errors with self-healing capabilities.
Agent mode is powered by your choice of Claude 3.5 and 3.7 Sonnet, Google Gemini 2.0 Flash, and OpenAI GPT-4o. Currently, agent mode achieves a pass rate of 56.0% on SWE-bench Verified with Claude 3.7 Sonnet. We anticipate agent mode to grow more capable as chain of thought reasoning models continue to advance.
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is now available in public preview
Developers spend their days conducting a wide array of tasks to get the job done, from research, to navigating telemetry, to infrastructure management, to coding and debugging. And they use many tools for this, the so-called engineering stack. MCP allows you to equip agent mode with the context and capabilities it needs to help you, like a USB port for intelligence. When you enter a chat prompt in agent mode within VS Code, the model can use different tools to handle tasks like understanding database schema or querying the web. This setup allows for more interactive and context-sensitive coding support.
For example, with a prompt to “Update my GitHub profile to include the title of the PR that was assigned to me yesterday,” agent mode would take that request, combined with the list of all available MCP tools, and ask an LLM what to do next. Over time, the agent would continue calling tools iteratively, until the task is complete.
Already, GitHub is home to a massive and growing MCP ecosystem that you can discover and use today. Here is a great repository that acts as a community inventory with some of the best MCP servers to use. The GitHub local MCP server equips agent mode with compelling capabilities such as searching across repositories and code, managing issues and creating PRs – turning agent mode into a powerful user of the GitHub platform.
Since GitHub Universe, we introduced a number of new models for chat, multi-file edits, and now agent mode. With the general availability of these models, we are introducing a new premium request type. Premium requests are in addition to the unlimited requests for agent mode, context-driven chat, and code completions in all paid plans for our base model (currently: OpenAI GPT-4o). Editor’s note (April 23, 2025): Rate limiting is in place to accommodate for high demand. Learn more about current models and usage.
Customers with Copilot Pro will receive 300 monthly premium requests, beginning on May 5, 2025. Customers with Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise will receive 300 and 1000 monthly premium requests respectively, starting between May 12 and May 19, 2025. Editor’s note (June 5th, 2025): Billing for premium requests is coming soon. Learn more here.
We are also introducing a new Pro+ plan for individuals with 1500 monthly premium requests and access to the best models, like GPT-4.5, for $39 per month.
Copilot paid users1 will also have the ability to pay-as-you-go for additional premium request usage. Individuals and organizations can choose to opt-in to use additional requests beyond their included amount, in addition to setting spending limits on requests to control costs with ease. GitHub Copilot Business and Enterprise administrators can manage requests via their Copilot Admin Billing Settings. Additional premium requests start at $0.04 per request.
Each premium model will consume a specific number of premium requests, allowing you to use a more powerful or efficient model when you need it, all while you have continued, unlimited access to the included models.
Happy 50th birthday, Microsoft!
Today is also a hallmark moment in the history of technology: our mothership turns 50! From the creation of BASIC or MS-DOS, to the .NET Framework and VS Code, to the acquisition of GitHub – Microsoft has always been a developer company at heart. Half a century of dev love is no small feat. ❤️
Now, with GitHub Copilot – what started out as a developer platform company is a platform where anyone can be a developer. Together, GitHub and Microsoft fully intend on enabling a world with 1 billion developers. 🗺️
Here is Satya using agent mode to re-create MSFT’s first BASIC in a single shot. Let the vibes take you away, Mr. Nadella. 🕺
Written by
Fascinated by software development since his childhood in Germany, Thomas Dohmke has built a career building tools to accelerate developer happiness. Previously, Thomas was the Chief Executive Officer of GitHub (2021-2025) where he oversaw the rise of the world’s most widely adopted AI developer tools—including the launches of GitHub Copilot, Copilot Workspace, and GitHub Models. Thomas has also been a celebrated TED speaker and holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from University of Glasgow, UK.
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