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Dev Revisits Visual Studio After Nearly a Decade, Gets Lost in AI-Era Completion Maze
"What has happened to Visual Studio?" asked a hobby coder on Reddit last week after returning to Visual Studio after almost a decade to find out just how much code completion has changed in the IDE while they were away.
The developer, who generally works in Jupyter Notebook, opened Visual Studio for a C# Unity project and found the modern editing experience overwhelming. Suggestions and popups repeatedly interrupted the coding flow, the user said, including an example in which typing g produced global.
"Every little thing I type I get pop ups asking if I mean this or that interrupting my flow," the developer wrote. "I just want to code!"
The resulting Reddit discussion was eventually marked solved, pointing to an old post actually about turning off IntelliCode, which just complicates things. The solution, however, raises a question that says a lot about the current Visual Studio experience: Which completion feature was actually causing the trouble?
IntelliSense, IntelliCode or Copilot?
The developer called the problem IntelliSense, and the example of a typed character turning into a keyword could involve Visual Studio's traditional completion list, its commit behavior or its suggestion mode.
A commenter responded with two links. The first went to Microsoft's settings for C# IntelliSense. The second went to a four-year-old Stack Overflow question about disabling gray inline predictions in Visual Studio 2022 while retaining the regular IntelliSense list.
That second feature is IntelliCode whole-line completion, not traditional IntelliSense. IntelliCode uses a locally running transformer model to predict a larger portion of the line and displays the prediction as gray text.
GitHub Copilot adds still more possibilities. Copilot provides generated completions at the current caret position, while Next Edit Suggestions, or NES, use recent changes to predict both what the developer may want to edit next and where that edit is likely to occur.
[Click on image for larger view.] AI Assistance in Visual Studio (source: Microsoft).
Without a screenshot, an exact Visual Studio version or information about installed components, it is impossible to say which system flummoxed the returning developer. The user may also have changed more than one setting before declaring the problem solved.
That uncertainty is arguably the point. A developer who left Visual Studio nearly a decade ago did not return to a single, greatly improved autocomplete feature. The developer returned to several generations of assistance operating inside the same editor.
Microsoft Has Been Directing the Completion Traffic
Microsoft has spent several years working out how those systems should interact.
The traffic problem was already well established by early 2023. Visual Studio Magazine
reported in "Devs Cite Problems with GitHub Copilot and IntelliSense Working Together" that developers were complaining about Copilot overriding conventional autocomplete, blocking dot-notation member lists and proposing plausible-looking members that did not actually exist.
GitHub responded that it had worked with the Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code teams on Copilot's editor behavior, while acknowledging that unexpected interoperability problems could emerge in development environments containing different combinations of extensions. The company also said it had recently enabled IntelliCode and Copilot to operate together.
That report and related GitHub discussions show that the problem was hardly isolated. Developers repeatedly complained that Copilot could suppress, replace or interfere with the conventional completion behavior they relied upon:
Some reports involved Visual Studio and others involved Visual Studio Code, but the underlying complaint was remarkably consistent: developers wanted Copilot's longer AI-generated predictions without losing quick access to IntelliSense's language-aware symbol and member lists.
A few months later, Microsoft went further, announcing that Visual Studio's IntelliSense list could actively steer a GitHub Copilot completion. As developers moved through the IntelliSense list, Copilot could use the selected member as additional context and adjust its longer prediction. Microsoft promoted a two-step workflow: press Tab to accept the IntelliSense member, then press Tab again to accept the Copilot continuation.
That approach closely integrated the two systems. More recently, Microsoft moved toward giving them separate turns.
Current Visual Studio documentation says Copilot completions are temporarily suppressed while IntelliSense is active, allowing the developer to focus on the completion list. Copilot resumes after the IntelliSense selection is committed or dismissed.
Microsoft highlighted that change in Visual Studio 2026 after acknowledging that simultaneous suggestions could be distracting. Visual Studio Magazine examined the change in "Visual Studio 2026 Gives IntelliSense Priority in Longstanding Copilot Completion Clash."
[Click on image for larger view.] IntelliSense Priority in Animated Action (source: Microsoft).
The company has also introduced controls for developers who want AI assistance without having every prediction immediately displayed. Copilot completions can be set to appear only after a pause or only when manually requested. NES can be collapsed so that a small gutter indicator announces an available edit without displaying the proposed change until the developer asks to see it.
Microsoft has documented direct cooperation between IntelliSense and ordinary Copilot completions. It has not clearly described the same kind of IntelliSense-to-NES handoff. The practical division is that IntelliSense helps select a precise symbol at the current cursor position, while NES looks for a related edit elsewhere after the initial change is made.
How To Make Visual Studio Less Helpful
Developers facing a similar wall of suggestions should first identify what is appearing:
- IntelliSense completion lists: Visual Studio allows developers to turn off automatic member lists while retaining the ability to invoke them manually. The exact path varies by release, but the controls are available under the language or Text Editor statement-completion settings. Developers can also press Ctrl+Alt+Space to switch between completion mode and a less aggressive suggestion mode. Microsoft provides more information in its IntelliSense documentation.
- Gray whole-line completions: In Visual Studio 2022, controls are available under Tools > Options > IntelliCode. In Visual Studio 2026, the relevant choices have moved under Tools > Options > Text Editor > Code Completions. Suggestions can be delayed until typing pauses, generated only on request or turned off. Microsoft details the feature in its whole-line completion guidance.
- Next Edit Suggestions: The Collapse Next Edit Suggestions option hides the proposed edit until the developer selects its gutter indicator or presses Tab. A second Tab accepts it, while Esc dismisses it. Microsoft documents those controls in its NES guidance.
[Click on image for larger view.] Disabling Autocomplete While GitHub Copilot Suggestion Is Shown (source: GitHub Discussion).
The accepted Stack Overflow answer also reflects an AI strategy that has since shifted. The question dates to the early Visual Studio 2022 era, when IntelliCode's local whole-line predictions were a major addition. Microsoft has since decommissioned IntelliCode extensions in Visual Studio Code as its focus moves toward Copilot, although current Visual Studio documentation continues to describe IntelliCode whole-line completion for C#.
The Reddit poster's diagnosis therefore may have been wrong, the accepted solution may have targeted a different feature, or several suggestion systems may have contributed to the experience.
Either way, the episode offers an amusing measure of Visual Studio's evolution. After almost 10 years away, the returning developer did not need help learning what the IDE could now predict. The immediate challenge was getting it to predict a little less.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.