Using Copilot cloud agent in your IDE

Start and track Copilot cloud agent sessions from Visual Studio Code, JetBrains IDEs, Eclipse, and Visual Studio.

Who can use this feature?

Copilot cloud agent is available with the GitHub Copilot Pro, GitHub Copilot Pro+, GitHub Copilot Business and GitHub Copilot Enterprise plans. The agent is available in all repositories stored on GitHub, except repositories owned by managed user accounts and where it has been explicitly disabled.
Sign up for Copilot

Tool navigation

In this article

Starting a session

  1. Install the GitHub Pull Requests extension for Visual Studio Code.

  2. Open GitHub Copilot Chat in Visual Studio Code.

  3. Type a prompt explaining what you want Copilot to do.

    For example, Put backticks around file names and variables in output

    Tip

    To help Copilot, you can select the relevant line(s) of code before submitting your prompt.

  4. Submit your prompt by clicking the Delegate this task to the GitHub Copilot cloud agent button, next to the Send button

  5. If you have local changes, a dialog will be displayed asking if you want to push those changes so Copilot can start from your current state. Click Include changes to push your changes, or Ignore changes to ask Copilot to start its work from your repository's default branch.

    Copilot will start a new session and respond with a link to the pull request it creates. It will work on the task and push changes to the pull request, and then add you as a reviewer when it has finished, triggering a notification.

Tracking your sessions

You can see a list of your running and past agent sessions for a specific repository in Visual Studio Code with the GitHub Pull Requests extension.

Once you've installed the extension, you can see Copilot's sessions by clicking the GitHub button in the sidebar.

For each session listed, you can see its status at a glance, or click on it to navigate to the pull request within Visual Studio Code.

To view the session logs, click on the pull request in the list, then click View Session.

To directly open agent sessions in VS Code, click the Open in VS Code option on the agents tab.

Note

Opening a session in VS Code is currently only available in VS Code Insiders.

Note

Copilot cloud agent in JetBrains IDEs is in public preview, and subject to change.

Starting a session

  1. Open GitHub Copilot Chat in your JetBrains IDE.

  2. Type a prompt explaining what you want Copilot to do.

    For example, Put backticks around file names and variables in output

  3. Click the Delegate to Cloud Agent button next to the Send button.

    Copilot will start a new session and respond with a link to the pull request it creates. It will work on the task and push changes to the pull request, and then add you as a reviewer when it has finished, triggering a notification from GitHub and in the IDE.

Tracking your sessions

You can see a list of your running and past agent sessions for a project in JetBrains IDEs with the GitHub Copilot Chat extension. See Installing the GitHub Copilot extension in your environment.

You can see all of Copilot's sessions by clicking the GitHub Cloud Agent Jobs button in the sidebar or by clicking the Open Job List button after delegating a task to Copilot from GitHub Copilot Chat.

For each session listed, you can see its status at a glance. Click Open in Browser to open the pull request in your browser, or right-click on a running job then click Cancel Job to cancel.

Copilot will also notify you when an agent job has started and finished.

Note

Copilot cloud agent in Eclipse is in public preview, and subject to change.

Starting a session

  1. Open GitHub Copilot Chat in Eclipse.

  2. Type a prompt explaining what you want Copilot to do.

    For example, Put backticks around file names and variables in output

  3. Click next to the Send button.

  4. In the dialog box that opens, select the repository you want Copilot to work in, then click Continue.

    Copilot will start a new session and respond with a link to the pull request it creates. It will work on the task and push changes to the pull request, and then add you as a reviewer when it has finished, triggering a notification from GitHub and in the IDE.

Tracking your sessions

You can see a list of your running and past agent sessions for a project in Eclipse with the GitHub Copilot Chat extension. See Installing the GitHub Copilot extension in your environment.

You can see all of Copilot's sessions by clicking at the top right of the chat window, or by clicking the Open Job List button after delegating a task to Copilot from GitHub Copilot Chat.

For each session listed, you can see its status at a glance. Click Open in Browser to open the pull request in your browser, or right-click on a running job then click Cancel Job to cancel.

Copilot will also notify you when an agent job has started and finished.

Note

To use Copilot cloud agent in Visual Studio, you'll need to be running at least December Update 18.1.0 of Visual Studio 2026.

Starting a session

  1. Enable Copilot cloud agent support in Visual Studio.

    1. Open the Tools menu, then click Options.
    2. In the sidebar, select GitHub.
    3. Check the Enable Copilot Cloud agent (preview) box.
    4. Restart Visual Studio.

  2. Open GitHub Copilot Chat in Visual Studio.

  3. Enter a prompt, giving details of what you want Copilot to change.

    For example, Put backticks around file names and variables in log output.

  4. Submit your prompt by clicking the Delegate this task to the GitHub Copilot cloud agent button, next to the Send button.

    Copilot asks you to confirm that you want to use the cloud agent to create a pull request.

  5. Click Confirm.

    Copilot will start a new session and respond with a link to the pull request it creates. It will work on the task and push changes to the pull request, and then add you as a reviewer when it has finished, triggering a notification.

Further reading