Ask Mode vs. Agent Mode: What’s Best for Your Workflow?

With GitHub Copilot becoming an essential part of modern development, .NET developers now have more control over how it supports their workflow. A new guide from Microsoft breaks down the difference between Ask Mode and Agent Mode, helping you choose the right Copilot experience based on your development needs.

Here’s a quick guide to help you decide between Ask Mode and Agent Mode—so you can boost productivity and solve problems faster as a .NET developer:

• Understanding Ask Mode

  Ask Mode is ideal for quick, focused support—Copilot responds based on the context you provide, without accessing your project files.

• Ask Mode is great for:

  Explaining C#/.NET concepts, providing code snippets, summarizing documentation, and sharing best practices or design patterns.

• Understanding Agent Mode

  Agent Mode works like an intelligent assistant embedded in your solution—it can read and reason about your actual codebase, perform edits, and automate tasks.

• Agent Mode is perfect for:

  Refactoring code, generating tests, fixing bugs, performing code analysis, or automating repetitive tasks using your real project context.