agent files: align tool names to names from custom agents specification #272734
Description
The custom agents specification defines a set of tool names:
| Primary alias | Purpose / Notes |
|---|---|
shell |
Execute a command in the appropriate shell for the operating system. |
read |
Read file contents. |
edit |
Allow LLM to edit . Exact arguments can vary. |
search |
Search for files or text in files. |
custom-agent |
Allows a different custom agent to be invoked to accomplish a task. Claude Code uses "Task" for triggering subagents which is close to the same idea. |
web |
Allows fetching content from URLs and performing a web search |
todo |
Creates and manages structured task lists |
Tool names for "out-of-box" MCP servers
The following MCP servers are available out-of-box for Copilot coding agent and can be referenced using namespacing.
| MCP server name | Available tools |
|---|---|
github |
All read-only tools are available by default, but the token the server receives is scoped to the source repository. github/* includes all of them, or you can reference github/<tool name> where <tool name> is a value from the MCP server documentation. |
playwright |
All playwright tools are available by default, but the server runs is configured to only access localhost. playwright/* includes all of them, or you can reference playwright/<tool name> where <tool name> is a value from the MCP server documentation. By default the token it has access to is scoped to the source code repository. |
We want to align our tool names with these tool names.
- show the new names in our tool picker
- existing agent and prompt file should continue to work, but we want to to guide users to update with squiggles and code actions
- we want to group all tools that require vscode as environment under a tool set
vscode