Disable Rubber Duck feature

[ckroiltd]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Copilot Agent Mode

Body

In Visual Studio, can we have a UI option to disable the Agent from automatically going into Rubber Duck mode and consuming more credits?

The Rubber Duck feature:
https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/agents/copilot-cli/rubber-duck

In Visual Studio Code, there is a setting to disable it. I cannot find an equivalent setting in VS.

[Dev4Bht]

It looks like Visual Studio currently doesn’t expose the same dedicated Rubber Duck disable setting that VS Code has. GitHub’s Visual Studio configuration docs list several Copilot options, but I couldn’t find a specific toggle for this behavior.

Adding a UI option under Tools → Options → GitHub → Copilot would be useful, especially for users who want more control over when Agent Mode consumes additional requests or credits. This seems like a reasonable feature request for the Visual Studio Copilot integration.

[depikaguptaa]

There's no toggle for it in Visual Studio yet, but you can make it kick in a lot less.

It's not random. Copilot calls rubber duck when it's planning bigger changes, after writing tests, or when it keeps failing. For small, clear tasks it mostly skips it. So splitting big asks into smaller steps already helps a lot.

You can also just tell it not to. Add a .github/copilot-instructions.md to your repo:

Don't use the rubber duck agent unless I ask for it.

and make sure custom instructions are turned on under Tools > Options > GitHub > Copilot. Not a hard off switch, but it listens to it.

(In VS Code it's chat.agentHost.rubberDuck.enabled btw.)

If you want an actual toggle in VS, it's worth posting on Developer Community. That's where the VS team actually tracks Copilot requests.

[ckroiltd]

Yeah, I feel tools which increase token use should always be optional through the UI.

Thanks, I've posted it in the VS Developer Community.