GitHub Copilot: Agent Skills in JetBrains IDEs

Agent Skills: Extending Copilot for Your Workflow

The headline addition in the February 2026 JetBrains update is Agent Skills support, now available in public preview. Skills are reusable capability packages that extend what Copilot's agent mode can do — they can load workflow-specific context, reduce repeated setup steps, and give the agent the right knowledge for a given task without manual prompting each time.

Developers have two paths to adopting skills: using community-shared skills from repositories like github/awesome-copilot, or building custom skills tailored to their own project structure and requirements. This creates a growing ecosystem of shareable agent configurations, similar in spirit to VS Code extensions or JetBrains plugins but operating at the AI instruction layer.

For Copilot Business and Enterprise subscribers, administrators must enable the "Editor preview features" policy before users can access Agent Skills.

Inline Chat Improvements

The update brings three targeted improvements to inline chat. Developers can now quickly add selected code as contextual input to a Copilot Chat conversation — reducing the friction of explaining which code to focus on. Inline chat is also now directly accessible from the floating code toolbar, cutting navigation steps. A third improvement addresses code organization during chat conversations, keeping the workspace tidier during iterative AI-assisted editing sessions.

Settings and Reliability

Settings management has been overhauled with individual toggles for Agent mode, Coding Agent, and Custom Agent — giving developers precise control over which agentic capabilities are active. Authentication reminders for unauthenticated users and clearer settings navigation round out the UX improvements.

On the reliability side, next edit suggestions are more stable, file navigation when collapsing and expanding code is smoother, and mode settings now persist correctly after IDE restart — a quality-of-life fix that eliminates unexpected resets between sessions.