Copilot's CLI moved to a Rust runtime and kept its TypeScript terminal

The August 28 changelog covers a week of Copilot releases across the app, the command line, JetBrains, Visual Studio, and VS Code. The item worth reading twice is in the CLI section: Copilot CLI now runs on a native Rust runtime, and its terminal interface remains built in TypeScript. GitHub calls the result significantly faster and leaves it at that, with no benchmark and no number attached.

The runtime changed, the interface did not

GitHub has not said which parts of Copilot CLI moved to Rust, and it has published no before-and-after measurements. What the changelog confirms is narrower: the CLI now runs on a native Rust runtime, and the terminal interface is still built in TypeScript. Which side of that split produces the announced speedup is therefore not something the announcement settles.

What GitHub has not published is how much faster. There is no benchmark in the changelog and no before-and-after timing, so anyone deciding whether the rewrite is worth an upgrade will have to measure it on their own project.

• Sessions that did not exit cleanly can now be restored, including sessions interrupted in the middle of a turn.
• Plugin, MCP server, and skill management got new interfaces behind the existing commands for each.
• The Customize tab in the Copilot app, which collects MCP servers, plugins, skills, and canvases in one place, is now generally available.

Permission mode became a setting instead of a habit

The CLI now takes a default execution mode and a default permission mode, and applies both to every new session. Until now the choice was made per session, which in practice meant it was made by whatever the operator typed most often.

That matters more than the naming suggests. A permission mode is the boundary between an agent that asks before it writes and one that does not, and a boundary that has to be re-established by hand each time is a boundary that eventually is not. Moving it into configuration also makes it reviewable, which is the same reason the enterprise controls below exist.

The same controls reached the editors

The rest of the week is the same idea applied in four other places. JetBrains gained enterprise controls covering plugins, MCP servers, telemetry, and agent permission modes. Visual Studio gained per-task control over reasoning effort along with model pinning, organization-wide custom agents, and a view of plan consumption before the limit is reached rather than after.

• VS Code 1.135 can pick up recent Copilot or Claude agent sessions that were started in other applications.
• It can also ask a second, complementary model for an opinion on what the first one missed.
• Chat usage is now itemized by model for every turn, which is the missing half of any conversation about premium request budgets.
• In Visual Studio, the Git agent reviews uncommitted changes or an individual commit before a pull request is opened.