Jetbrains

GitHub Copilot Goes Fully Agentic in JetBrains: Hooks, MCP, and Instruction Files

In mid-March 2026, GitHub promoted a major bundle of Copilot agentic capabilities to general availability in JetBrains IDEs, moving key features out of preview for day-to-day use.

The changelog reads like a checklist of what “serious agentic IDE support” now means:

• Custom agents and sub-agents, plus a planning-oriented agent workflow for breaking down complex work
• Agent hooks in public preview, so teams can run custom commands at defined points in an agent session
• MCP auto-approve at server and tool granularity to reduce approval friction when policies allow it
• Automatic discovery of AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md instruction files during agent sessions
• Auto model selection generally available, with Copilot choosing models based on availability and performance
• An extended reasoning experience for models that expose more explicit thinking, such as Codex-class workflows

Why JetBrains Users Should Care

JetBrains IDEs are where many teams live for deep language support, refactoring, and navigation. Agent features only matter if they meet developers in that workflow, not as a separate tool they resent switching to.

JetBrains Air and the Case for the Agent-Native IDE

JetBrains Air, launched in public preview in early March, is one of the more interesting answers yet to a question the AI tooling market keeps circling: do we really want agents bolted onto traditional editors, or do we eventually need environments designed around them from the start?

Air is betting on the second path.

Why Air Is Interesting

Most current AI coding tools still inherit the shape of the pre-AI IDE. There is a primary editor, maybe a chat pane, maybe an agent sidebar, and the user is still clearly the central operator of a mostly traditional workspace.

Cursor in JetBrains and the End of IDE Lock-In

One of the quietest but most important developer-tooling stories of March 2026 is that Cursor is now available directly inside JetBrains IDEs through the Agent Client Protocol, or ACP, registry.

At first glance, this looks like a convenience feature. Cursor users can keep their preferred agent while staying in IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, or WebStorm. JetBrains users get access to a popular agentic workflow without switching editors. Nice, but not transformative.