Liam Hampton
Senior Cloud Advocate and software engineer at Microsoft/GitHub focused on developer tooling, cloud, DevOps, and AI-assisted software development, including GitHub Copilot and agent workflows in VS Code.
VS Code Can Render MCP Tool Results as Interactive Apps
GitHub’s Marlene Mhangami and Liam Hampton argue that MCP apps turn chat from a text response surface into a place where tool output can be operated directly. In their VS Code demo, an MCP server profiles a Go app, returns data plus a reference to a bundled HTML UI, and VS Code renders the result as a sandboxed interactive flame graph inside Copilot chat. Their case is that the useful boundary is precise: tools provide data, resources provide the interface, and the host contains the app while keeping the user in context.
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.