Cooking with Agents in VS Code — Liam Hampton, Microsoft

One codebase, three problems, three agents running at the same time. Liam Hampton from Microsoft demos the full loop in VS Code: a local agent with Claude Opus writing and fixing unit tests with him in the loop, a background agent using a git work tree to build a front end from a GitHub issue without him touching it, and a cloud agent running in GitHub Actions to make the repo open source friendly. The talk is a framework for knowing which agent path to pick and why. Local when you want hands on iteration. Background when the task is big and you can tolerate being half in half out. Cloud when you genuinely do not care how it gets done. VS Code handles all three from one interface, with Copilot, Claude, and third party agents accessible from the same control plane. Speaker info: - https://x.com/liamchampton - https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-conroy-hampton/ - https://github.com/liamchampton