Transcription
Plan mode inside of Visual Studio Code is one of my favorite features when I'm developing with AI. Not only because I often have an idea, but it's not really fully fleshed out. The great part about plan mode is it gives you a detailed analysis and asks questions along the way.
In the latest release of VS Code, there are game-changing features, not only to help you answer those questions, to really drill down in those details, but also handling the handoff and implementation as well. So, I want to show you today some of my favorite brand new features to plan mode inside of VS Code. So, let's check it out.
Okay, here I am inside the latest VS Code. And I have my Visual Studio wallpapers website here, which allows me to browse desktop, phone, and even watch wallpapers for VS and VS Code. While I love this website that I built out, I'd really love a new favorites feature or even like a search feature, for example. That would be like really, really nice. So, let's go ahead and go into plan mode.
So, I'm going to pop over here. And the first thing I want to do is call out that I can just start a new like sort of local session here with Copilot, a background session powered by the GitHub Copilot CLI cloud session. Then I could delegate out that work to the uh cloud agent. Or I can actually start up a new session here with the cloud agent SDK or even the CodeX extension, for example. But I'm just going to do it here locally. And we're going to change our mode over here into plan. And I first want to call out here that it switched automatically to GBT52 because I like to use different models for different agents pretty much. So let's go ahead and get this to work.
So I'm going to say, "I would like to add a new favorites feature for people to favorite a wallpaper and have a dedicated page. Can do it all locally. No user accounts." Right. I'm going to go ahead and send that off. So now this is going to get to work and I can actually see that we have a few sessions already here. One I was sort of looking at user accounts. This one here it says adding a new favorites feature and it's in progress and I can see up top here that it's actually a session in progress. So here it's going to get to work and sub-agents are going to start to sort of parse this and a bunch of sub-agents are going to spin up and they have their own little context of reading files and understanding things and then that will report back to the main agent.
What I also love is that I can just do, you know, new session and I could say, "Let's plan out a search feature for the website." So I could just spin up yet another plan going on and see it over here. So that's going to get to work. All right. So the sub-agents are reading, they're grepping, they're looking for different things and understanding the codebase. And I always sort of go into plan mode first, mostly because I kind of have an idea in my head, but it's not fully fleshed out. And I may not know every single part of the codebase that I even want or need to touch. So all these sub-agents are going to pull together what the implementation may look like and it's also going to ask me questions along the way.
So now that it understands here, it's going to ask a few questions. So it says, "Hey, I got a few questions for you so we can update the plan." So all right, cool. What do we want to know here? So it's considering some questions and this is really cool. So I'm right in the flow. It's going to say, "What collections should support favoring?" So here I'm just going to say, "Yeah, let's just do, yeah, all of them. That's cool." Go to the next question. "Where should the favorite toggle live?" "In the preview on each grid tile?" Let's do preview. I think that makes the most sense. "And then on a favorites page. What should clicking a favorite item do?" "Should it open the wallpapers preview modal? Navigate to the corresponding gallery page?" Uh, let's just do the modal. That sounds fine. And submit it back.
That brand new interactive questions to really help the planning is super nice. I no longer need to read a bunch of things. I can do multi-select. I don't need to type in 1, 2, 3, 4, for example, into here. And this is now going to flesh out the rest of the feature. So that alone is a huge dramatic win uh when I'm planning out features. And here it is. We have our full planned out feature here.
Okay, cool. So now that this is here, I can do a few things. I can open in an editor, which is going to give me a prompt file that I could save locally and execute later. I could go in and actually continue in the background or continue in the cloud. But I'm just going to go ahead and start implementation. And I want to point out one thing that happened really quick there, which is that the local agent moved over into agent mode and switched over to GPT52 CodeX. That's a new feature in this release.
So let me show you how I did all this while that gets to work. I'm going to go into settings. And the first thing that we're going to do is search for default model. And here in default model, there are several that you can now pick and choose from. So there's a default inline chat. So this is the default model that I've chosen, which is Gemini 3 Flash, because I'm kind of usually sectioning off a tiny bit of code. And then down here, we also have an implement agent and a plan agent and even sub-agents as well that you can go ahead and choose those names. So here I chose GPT52 Copilot and GPT52 CodeX Copilot to go ahead and do. So if you have a favorite model that you want, or you can just leave it blank and use the same model everywhere, which is great.
And then additionally, if I go into questions here, and here you can see all you have to do is make sure that the ask questions is enabled right there. Honestly, like these two features alone really pull together how I plan and integrate in my workflow. And now we can see CodeX is getting to work here, the 52 CodeX. And we can see all of the to-do list that it was put together and the files changed. So honestly, these are game-changing features when planning out and implementing features with VS Code.
All right, there you go. There are some of my favorite features, brand new inside of VS Code. Download it, enable it, check them all out. Today I showed you all the different settings you need to enable if they're not enabled for you already. So go turn them on.