@ Mentions and Agent Mode Context

How Each Tool Gets Context

• VSCode Chat — Ask/Plan mode (manual context)
  • › @workspace — searches your codebase
  • › @terminal — includes terminal output
  • › @vscode — knows about editor settings and commands
  • › Drag & drop files into chat
  • › Select code → 'Add to Chat'
• VSCode Chat — Agent mode (auto-discovers) — the AI doesn't wait for you to feed context. It actively searches, reads files, runs searches, checks LSP diagnostics, even runs terminal commands. Just describe the task.
• Copilot CLI context
  • › #file:path/to/file.js to include a specific file
  • › Drag & drop from file explorer
  • › CLI auto-reads relevant files in agentic mode
• Claude Code — automatically discovers context via Read, Grep, Glob tools. CLAUDE.md provides persistent project context loaded into every session.

Context Power Moves

1. 1 #runSubagent — creates a context-isolated sub-task within VSCode Chat. The subagent gets a fresh context, does its work, and returns results — similar to Claude Code's spawned agents.
2. 2 In VSCode Agent mode, just describe what you want without any @ mentions — watch how the AI finds context on its own
3. 3 Use #runSubagent for isolated research tasks that shouldn't pollute your main conversation context
4. 4 In Copilot CLI, use #file:path to explicitly include files when the auto-discovery misses something