Review AI-generated code edits
When you interact with chat in Visual Studio Code, the AI can generate code edits across multiple files in your project. This article explains how to review, accept, or discard these AI-generated code edits.
Pending changes
Once the AI has made changes to your files, they are directly applied and saved to disk. VS Code keeps track of which files have pending edits and lets you review them individually or all at once.
The Chat view shows the list of files that were edited and are pending your review. Files with pending edits also have an indicator in the Explorer view and editor tabs with a squared-dot icon.
When you open a file that was changed, the editor shows an inline diff of the applied changes.
When you close VS Code, the status of the pending edits is remembered and restored when you reopen VS Code.
Review changes
With the editor overlay controls, you can navigate between the suggested edits by using the Up and Down controls. Use the Keep or Undo button to accept or reject the edits for a given file.
When you hover over an inline change, the overlay controls let you accept or reject individual changes. In the Chat view, you can accept or reject all changes across all files at once.
Source Control integration
If you stage your changes in the Source Control view, any pending edits are automatically accepted. On the other hand, if you discard your changes, any pending edits are also discarded.
Auto-accept edits
You can configure VS Code to automatically accept AI-generated code edits after a specific delay with the chat.editing.autoAccept setting. By hovering over the editor overlay controls, you can cancel the auto-accept countdown.
If you automatically accept all edits, it's strongly recommended to still review the changes before committing them in source control. Learn more about the security considerations of using AI in VS Code.
Edit sensitive files
To prevent inadvertent edits to sensitive files, such as workspace configuration settings or environment settings, VS Code prompts you to approve edits before they are applied.
Use the chat.tools.edits.autoApprove setting to configure which files require approval. The setting uses glob patterns to match file paths in your workspace.
The following example configuration automatically allows edits to all files except for JSON files in the .vscode folder and files named .env, which you are prompted to approve:
"chat.tools.edits.autoApprove": {
"**/*": true,
"**/.vscode/*.json": false,
"**/.env": false
}