GitHub Copilot is getting a whole lot more agentic with increased context of tools and services, powered by the world’s leading models, starting today
In celebration of Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, GitHub announced its rolling out agent mode with MCP support to all VS Code users. It also introduced the new GitHub Copilot Pro+ plan with premium requests, the general availability of models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, next edit suggestions for code completions and the Copilot code review agent.
“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,” said Thomas Dohmke, CEO, GitHub. “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. 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, which in just over a month in preview has been used by over 1 million developers on GitHub. Plus, the general availability of next edit suggestions so you can tab tab tab your way to coding glory,” Dohmke added.
“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.”
Thomas Dohmke, CEO, GitHub
Agent mode in VS Code
Agent mode is progressively rolling out to VS Code users in stable, as GitHub aims for full availability to all users in the coming weeks. Developers can also manually enable it now.
Compared to chat or multi-file edits, which allow users to propose code changes across multiple files in your workspace, agent mode is fundamentally capable of taking action to translate 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 the primary goal is achieved. Agent mode can suggest terminal commands or tool calls and ask a developer to execute them. It also analyzes run-time errors with self-healing capabilities.
Since the launch to VS Code Insiders in February, developers have been using agent mode for a variety of tasks: from autofixing code gen errors, to building webapps, to yeeting commits.
Agent mode is powered by a 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. GitHub anticipates 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 developers to equip agent mode with the context and capabilities it needs to help them, 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 developers can 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.
Users can get started by setting up local and remote MCP servers and using tools with agent mode in Visual Studio.
Premium model requests
Since GitHub Universe, GitHub introduced a number of new models for chat, multi-file edits, and now agent mode. With the general availability of these models, GitHub is 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 GitHub’s base model (currently: OpenAI GPT-4o).
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. Until then, use of these premium models is unlimited.
GitHub is 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 users 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.
Each premium model will consume a specific number of premium requests, allowing developers to use a more powerful or efficient model when they need it, all while having continued unlimited access to Copilot’s base model.
Happy 50!
Friday was also a hallmark moment in the history of technology: GitHub’s mothership turned 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 developer 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.
A top Copilot-powered developer platform to build, scale, and deliver secure software, GitHub boasts of more than 150 million developers, including more than 90% of the Fortune 100 companies, use GitHub to collaborate and more than 77,000 organizations have adopted GitHub Copilot.
