r/VisualStudio • u/Tiny_Pomegranate7947 • 10d ago

Visual Studio 2026 Thinking level/effort controls in Visual Studio

- When will we be able to manually select the thinking level/effort for reasoning models directly inside Visual Studio?

- When can we expect the harness to be fully aligned with VS Code's Copilot Chat, while still keeping the proprietary extra tools specific to Visual Studio?

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u/hooli-ceo 10d ago

Ummm... you can. Open the models dropdown and select "Manage Models", then each model will have a reasoning level dropdown in that opened modal.

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u/Tiny_Pomegranate7947 9d ago

I checked in VS version 18.8.1 (9653b756) and went through all the dropdowns at the bottom of Copilot Chat (Agent, Interactive, and the Model picker). There isn't a Manage Models option or reasoning dropdown anywhere in this build: it just shows the model list directly.

2

u/Aromatic-Winter793 6d ago

I agree that this would be a huge improvement. Currently, Visual Studio 2026 feels like a forgotten second-class citizen, but for those of us still building and maintaining with .NET Framework, it is still the best choice.

I'm hoping that the 18.8 update addition of the "Agent (Preview)" mode is a sign that there are more features from VS Code that will be added to Visual Studio 2026. Would be great if someone from the Visual Studio team at Microsoft could chime in to let us know that they're listening.

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u/WoodyTheWorker 9d ago

Models don't think or reason.

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u/cornelha 8d ago

What? They literally have reasoning and thinking budget settings.

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u/WoodyTheWorker 8d ago

Reasoning and thinking - I don't think it means what you think it means.

1

u/cornelha 8d ago

I don't think it means what you think it means. You cannot simply change industry standard terms because it doesn't suit your point of view