Spaces for VS Code

An AI-powered on-call and engineering copilot for Microsoft engineering teams. Open an isolated, fully-instrumented VS Code workspace for every ICM incident, ADO task, or multi-repo exploration — pre-loaded with the right repos, wikis, MCP tools, and specialized agents so GitHub Copilot can get to work immediately.

Audience: Microsoft engineers with access to Azure DevOps, ICM, Kusto, and GitHub Copilot.

🌟 Why Spaces?

Built to compress on-call cycle time and lower the cost of context-switching — so engineers spend their time on root cause and customer impact, not on cloning repos and chasing Kusto links.

🚀 Accelerated velocity

• 🔎 Fast-track ICM resolution. Copilot starts the investigation with context, not a blank screen — incident details, recent code changes, an initial Kusto query, and candidate TSGs are all in the workspace before you read the first line.
• 🛠️ From task to PR in the same window. AdoAgent + CodeDetective explore the codebase, plan the work, and draft the PR without leaving the workspace.
• 🎯 Focus on solving, not setting up. No clone-the-repo / find-the-TSG / hunt-the-Kusto-query rituals — the workspace lands pre-configured.

🏗️ How it works

• 🗂️ Spaces Portal dashboard. A single VS Code panel lists your active ICMs, ADO tasks, custom spaces, and analytics. One click opens any of them in its own color-coded window.
• 🪟 Isolated workspaces per task. Every space lives in its own folder, with its own clones, its own state (workspace_status.json), and its own Copilot instructions. Context never bleeds between investigations.
• 🧠 Specialized agents, pre-configured. Each space type lands with the right roster — IcmAgent + CodeDetective + LogAnalyst + GenevaAnalyst + RetrospecAgent for ICM investigations; AdoAgent + CodeDetective + LogAnalyst + RetrospecAgent for ADO tasks; CodeDetective + LogAnalyst + RetrospecAgent for multi-repo exploration.
• 🔌 MCP-wired Copilot. ICM, ADO, Kusto, Geneva, Eschat, Engineering Hub, Teams, Azure, and Work-IQ MCP servers are auto-configured per workspace.
• ⚡ Optional event monitoring. Spaces can poll ICM queues for new incidents (auto-investigate + triage), watched ICMs for new comments (notification only), and ADO work items tagged Go-Spaces (the tag is hardcoded today; notification only — no write-back to ADO).
• 🔬 InspectorX integration. Microsoft's deep code-review companion extension is offered for install (prompted by default, silent when spaces.inspectorX.autoInstall is on) to power fix verification.

Quick start

Prerequisites

The extension auto-checks and (on macOS / Windows) attempts to auto-install what it needs on startup via Homebrew / WinGet. Failures are non-blocking — the extension still loads, missing tools are logged as warnings.

Recommended: install the Peacock extension so Spaces can color each workspace window.

Open your first space

1. Run Spaces: Open Portal from the command palette.
2. Pick a user type if prompted (Developer / Manager / Support Engineer — this filters which space types you see).
3. From the Portal, click Create Investigation (ICM) or Create Task (ADO), enter the ID, and let Spaces provision the workspace.
4. A new VS Code window opens in the workspace folder, color-coded, with Copilot already configured. Read START_HERE.md and go.

See QUICK_START.md for the 2-minute version.

Space types

Which spaces appear in your Portal depends on your selected user type (configured via the spaces.userTypes setting; built-in roles include SWE, EM, and PM, and you can ship your own JSON profile that tags space templates). The analytics templates are not in any built-in role's tag set today, so they only surface when no role is selected (or via a custom user-type override).

Configuration

All settings live under spaces.* in VS Code settings. Most have sensible auto-detected defaults thanks to the bundled WorkIQ auto-detect service, which reads your ADO identity and recent work to pre-populate org / project / team / role / ICM Copilot team.

Azure DevOps

Workspace storage

Knowledge base wikis

spaces.knowledgeBaseWikis is an array of wiki repos to clone into every workspace under knowledge-base/. Each entry:

{
  "name": "Service Docs",
  "url": "https://dev.azure.com/myorg/myproject/_git/MyService.Wiki",
  "folderName": "knowledge-base/service-docs.wiki",
  "enabled": true
}

Agents (IcmAgent, CodeDetective, etc.) recursively search knowledge-base/ for TSGs, architecture docs, and runbooks — predictable location regardless of how many wikis are configured.

To find a wiki's clone URL: open the wiki in ADO → "Clone Wiki" in the top-right "More" menu → copy the HTTPS URL.

Feature flags

spaces.features.* toggles optional capabilities:

Event monitoring (optional)

Off by default. Set spaces.events.enabled = true to opt in.

When enabled, three event sources are registered, each with a different pipeline:

• ICM queue (new incidents) — auto-investigate + triage, plus the global handlers.
• ICM comments (new comments on watched incidents) — notification only, plus the global handlers.
• ADO work items tagged Go-Spaces — notification only, plus the global handlers. The trigger tag is hardcoded; there is no setting today to override it.

The global handlers (applied to all sources) are notification, lifecycle tracking, and dashboard update. A fourth global handler — ICM write-back — only acts on ICM lifecycle events (it filters out non-ICM entities), so ADO events never write back to ADO. ICM write-back surfaces four language-model tools to Copilot — icm_read_discussion, icm_add_discussion_entry, icm_update_keywords, icm_add_tags — all governed by spaces.icm.writeMode.

Sample workflows

ICM investigation

1. Spaces: Create Investigation → enter ICM 12345.
2. Spaces provisions ~/Spaces/ICM-12345/, clones the implicated service repos + your wikis, writes START_HERE.md, and opens a fresh VS Code window.
3. Copilot lands as the IcmAgent: reads incident context, runs initial Kusto queries via LogAnalyst, checks recent code changes via CodeDetective, optionally pulls metric anomalies from GenevaAnalyst.
4. Findings are written as confidence-graded artifacts (impact_assessment.md, repro_query.kql, investigation_log.md) — see Spaces.AI/src/AGENTS.md for the quality standards every agent must follow.
5. When wrapping up, RetrospecAgent offers (never auto-runs) a continuous-improvement pass on the wiki.

ADO task → PR

1. Spaces: Create Task → enter ADO 67890.
2. Spaces provisions the workspace and clones the relevant repo.
3. Copilot, as the AdoAgent + CodeDetective pair, fetches work-item context, explores the codebase, and proposes a plan.
4. Implementation happens in the same window; the orchestrator delegates PR creation back to AdoAgent (which knows the dual-project Tasks-vs-Repos routing rule).

Multi-repo exploration

1. Spaces: Generate Space (or Create Space from the Portal) → pick the multi-repo template and paste the repos you want side-by-side.
2. Spaces clones them all into one workspace; Copilot has cross-repo grep, semantic search, and the full MCP fleet from the first turn.

Architecture

Manager / Worker. The Portal (Manager) lives in your main VS Code window and watches the spaces base path. Each space (Worker) is a self-contained folder with its own state file, its own clones, its own START_HERE.md, and its own Copilot instructions. Workers never depend on Manager state — everything they need is provisioned at creation time.

A new VS Code window is opened per worker, color-coded via Peacock, so you can run many investigations in parallel without losing track of which is which.

License

Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Further reading

• QUICK_START.md — 2-minute getting-started guide
• docs/PREREQUISITES.md — Required tools and setup details
• docs/SPECIFICATION.md — Full system specification
• docs/SAFE_COMMANDS.md — Auto-approved terminal commands
• ../Spaces.AI/README.md — Agents, MCPs, spaces, quality standards
• ../ARCHITECTURE.md — Cross-package architecture
• ../docs/Work-IQ-Setup-Guide.md — Work-IQ MCP server setup