When GitHub Copilot was originally launched over year ago (October 2021), it didn’t work really well with the Visual Studio Intellisense. Sometimes it blocked the Intellisense suggestions and sometimes other way around. However now things have changed and Copilot plays nicely with it’s older brother Intellisense.
Visual Studio Copilot extension 1.84.X version has received a significant improvement that binds the Intellisense and Copilot together. You can check and update your extension version from Visual Studio Manage Extensions window. I recommend doing that, because If you have version 1.7X or earlier of GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio, your extension might not automatically update.
Intellipilot
Now that we have new and shiny Copilot, let’s see how it plays with the Intellisense. In this example I have PersonRepository class with add, update and delete methods. Now like in normal case when I type dot (.) after variable name I get the intellisense suggestions. Unlike in previous versions, now I can cycle through the Intellisense suggestions and also see the Copilot code suggestions at the same time. This means that now the Intellisense is feeding information for Copilot.
You can also hide the Intellisense window now by pressing left CTRL key. This way it’s easier to preview multiline predictions. Hiding the window makes the Intellisense window more transparent.
One nice feature is that Copilot does not anymore accept the whole suggestion automatically, if you are viewing Intellisense options. When you press the TAB one time, it will only fill the selected Intellisense option and then if you press TAB another time, it will use the Copilot prediction. Small but nice feature.
There are some situations still left that will lead you into WTF moments. For example when going through suggestion for word pre, you will get some interesting Copilot predictions, but I think the overall experience is now at good level and the AI tools plays really well together.
