Microsoft has updated Visual Studio Code (VS Code) to version 1.97, in which the company said that GitHub Copilot is now treated as an “out-of-the-box experience,” and previewed a key new feature, WebGPU rendering in the editor. 

This is a bigger than usual release as it is the first since early December when the typical monthly cycle is broken for the holiday season.

Copilot features have formed a major part of VS Code updates for some time, but the change here is that because there is now a free Copilot plan, the VS Code team will track Copilot updates as part of the main product, according to distinguished engineer Kai Maetzel, who runs the VS Code engineering team. We note that although there is now a free plan, it is limited to 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month, which is unlikely to be sufficient for most developers.

Maetzel references “AI support” in his remark while at the same time calling it “client-side work for Copilot,” and this verbal sleight of hand is a problem for companies with competing AI coding assistants. VS Code is the most popular editor by a large margin, used by 74 percent of professional developers according to the most recent Stack Overflow survey. Third-parties can create AI coding extensions, but some features are specific to Copilot, giving GitHub an advantage.

Competitor AI editor Cursor gets around this to some extent by being based on a fork of VS Code, the stated reason being that it gives more control over the user interface, greater AI integration, and that “some of our features are not possible as plugins to existing coding environments.”

New Copilot features in this update include a preview of predictive suggestions for the next edit a developer might be about to make. This is different from the existing code completion feature, since it applies to edits rather than new code, and may be outside the current cursor location. If the suggestion is correct, pressing the tab key navigates to the new location and adds the code. The teams states that Next Edit suggestions can correct typos, fix logic errors, help with refactoring, and make changes based on changed intent. This feature must be enabled in settings, where it is called github.copilot.nextEditSuggestions.

Two new models have been added, OpenAI o3-mini and Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash.

Another Copilot feature, called auto accept updates, automatically accepts edit suggestions after a configurable timeout. Those who believe that all AI edits should be reviewed by a human will be glad to know that this is off by default.

Copilot agent mode is a new experimental feature, which gives the AI the ability to complete a task end to end. Currently this is only in the preview Insiders build of VS Code. Agent mode can only edit files with the current workspace, and any terminal commands require human confirmation, presumably as a safety feature. A further agentic feature called codebase search will asks Copilot to find files relevant to your task. There is more information on Copilot agent mode in GitHub’s post.

An experimental setting for GPU rendering in the editor is now available. This is a feature that Microsoft software engineer Daniel Imms has been working on for some time, with goals including “big wins for FPS/scrolling performance and overall smoothness of the application,” especially on older hardware, and to reduce input latency. There is already WebGPU-based rendering as an option for the VS Code terminal powered by Xterm.js. Back in 2022, Imms noted issues with accessibility and the complexity of integrating with DOM (Document Object Model) functionality in the editor. 

The current implementation falls back to DOM rendering when necessary. It is unlikely to be stable enough for general use yet and Imms remarked in November that “this will probably be a preview feature for like a year if I’m being realistic,” but despite the intricacies of the work it holds promise for improving the core feature of VS Code.

Ruby developers will be glad to see that language support now comes from Shopify’s ruby-lsp in place of the old Ruby grammar which was unmaintained.

There are plenty of other changes in this release and more details are in the release notes.