We are thrilled to announce that the Microsoft Foundry Toolkit for VS Code, formerly AI Toolkit, is now Generally Available (GA)!
From first model prompt to production‑grade AI agents, Foundry Toolkit lets you build, debug, and ship AI end to end without ever leaving VS Code.
Same Product. New Name.
You may know this extension as AI Toolkit — and we thank you for using it in the past year and for the continuous feedback that has shaped the product. With this GA release, we’re rebranding AI Toolkit to Microsoft Foundry Toolkit. The new name reflects where we’re headed: a single, unified developer experience for building AI apps and agents on the Microsoft AI platform. Rest assured, this is a name change only — there are no plans to remove or deprecate any existing features.
Empower AI Development from Idea to Production with Foundry Toolkit
The GA release brings together the most requested features into a high-performance workflow:
- 🧪 Curated Model Playground: Don’t waste time with setup. Browse and chat with over 100+ state-of-the-art models from Microsoft Foundry, GitHub, OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, and more. Compare performance side-by-side and export production-ready code in seconds.
- 🤖 Agent Builder (No-Code/low code): Experiment with agent ideas or build sophisticated agents without writing boilerplate code. Define instructions, link tools from the Foundry catalog, or connect local MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers to have a functional agent running in minutes.
- ✨GitHub Copilot powered agent development: With Foundry tools and skills built into the Toolkit, GitHub Copilot is equipped with deep context to jumpstart agent creation using the Microsoft Agent Framework - often from a single prompt.
- 🛠️ Deep-Cycle Debugging: Move beyond black-box AI. The Agent Inspector provides real-time workflow visualization, breakpoints, and full local tracing across tool calls and agent chains.
- ⚡ Edge-Optimized Performance: Specialized support for the Phi model family. Fine-tune Phi Silica on your data, quantize for NPU/GPU targets, and profile on-device performance to ensure your models run lean and fast.
- 🚀 Seamless Scale: Transition from local to cloud with one click. Deploy directly to the Microsoft Foundry Agent Service and run continuous evaluations using familiar pytest syntax within the VS Code Test Explorer.
Get Started Today
- Install: Microsoft Foundry Toolkit on VS Code Marketplace.
- Quick Start: Follow our 3-Minute Getting Started Tutorial to build your first AI agent.
- Deep Dive: Check out documentations, Samples, and workshop.
Join the Community
Join us on Model Monday event on 4/20 where we will talk through Building Foundry Agents using VS Code and GitHub Copilot.
We can’t wait to see what you build. Share your projects, file issues, or suggest features on our GitHub repository. Welcome to the next chapter of AI development!
Microsoft