Liam Hampton

VS Code Unifies Local, Background, and Cloud Coding Agents

Microsoft’s Liam Hampton argues that coding agents should be chosen by the amount of control a developer wants to keep, not treated as a single all-purpose assistant. In a VS Code demo using one repository, he assigns tests to a local Claude agent for hands-on iteration, a front-end build to a background agent isolated in a Git worktree, and open-source documentation to a cloud agent running through GitHub Actions. His case is that VS Code can act as the control plane for these modes, including Copilot, Claude, and third-party agents.