Mastering GitHub Copilot in Your IDE: Inline Suggestions, Chat, and Agent Mode

GitHub Copilot does more than provide access to different subscription plans. Once enabled in your IDE, Copilot becomes an active part of your daily workflow. It can suggest code in real time, respond to natural language comments, help explain complex sections of code, and even automate large-scale changes. Understanding how these features work inside your development environment is the key to using Copilot effectively and responsibly.

In this chapter, we will explore Copilot’s IDE functionalities step by step. You will learn how completions speed up routine coding, how comments can be turned into real implementations, and how inline suggestions adapt to the context of your project. We will also cover Copilot Ask Mode for conversational help, Copilot Edit Mode for refactoring and improvements, and Copilot Agent Mode for automating multi-step tasks across your repository. Along the way, you will...