Microsoft has been heavily investing in AI integration in its flagship integrated development environment (IDE), Visual Studio, for the past couple of years. However, it really ramped up this effort with Visual Studio 2026, which is currently in preview. Now, the Redmond tech giant has begun testing a Copilot feature that could be a game-changer for developers using Visual Studio.
Although Visual Studio allows quick prompts and reusable prompt files for development workflows, Microsoft understands that they don"t work well in complex projects and require constant monitoring and iterations from the developer. To work around this problem, Microsoft has announced a public preview of the Planning feature in Visual Studio.
When Copilot is run in Agent Mode using this feature, it will have the ability to research your codebase, break down your ask into smaller problems, and then work on them step by step with iterations that refine the output. Microsoft believes that this structured breakdown of tasks will give developers more transparency when it comes to the generated code.
Developers who utilize this feature in Visual Studio will notice that Copilot will automatically determine if it should treat the problem as a quick prompt that will generate a faster response, or a multi-step plan that offers a coordinated path to the solution. If it"s the latter, the plan will be generated in markdown format and will also indicate the progress of the overall task. The plan will also be written to the %TEMP%\VisualStudio\copilot-vs\ location so that you can reuse it across threads, if needed. That said, if you edit the plan, the changes won"t be instantaneous, and you will have to execute the prompt again; Microsoft is looking into making this process smoother, though.
Microsoft has highlighted that in its own testing, both GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4 models gained improvements in accuracy and speed when they leveraged Planning. The company measured it as having "15% higher success and 20% more tasks resolved", but it is in the process of testing other models to confirm the presence of a trend too.
In terms of upcoming improvements, Microsoft is looking to improve caching processes, improve model reasoning, and increase contextual understanding of projects. For now, Planning in Copilot Chat is available in public preview in Visual Studio 2022 17.14. It"s undergoing a staggered rollout, but if it"s not enabled for you yet, do check Tools > Options > Copilot > Enable Planning.