From the course: AI-Powered Development: GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code

Unlock this course with a free trial

Join today to access over 25,300 courses taught by industry experts.

Actions overview

Actions overview

From the course: AI-Powered Development: GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Actions overview

“

In this chapter, we'll look at how to invoke actions in our chat queries. Our main focus is on chat tools because they're the modern structured way Copilot performs real actions inside Visual Studio Code. But to understand why they matter, we need to briefly contrast them with their predecessor slash commands. In the modern Copilot architecture, actions are performed through chat tools, which we invoke using the hash symbol. These tools represent real structured capabilities, things CoPilot can actually do inside Visual Studio Code. Before chat tools existed, CoPilot relied on slash commands. Slash commands were simple UI shortcuts that expanded into natural language prompts. They were helpful in the ask mode and the edit mode and some of them did trigger actions but only in a limited one-shot way. However, you may still see a handful of slash commands in the chat UI. These aren't part of the modern copilot system. We can still see some of them, however. In other words, they've been…

Contents