Harshada Hole explores the capabilities of the Copilot Profiler Agent, showcasing how this AI-powered assistant in Visual Studio 2026 helps developers analyze, optimize, and validate performance improvements directly within their workflow.

Announcing the Copilot Profiler Agent: AI-Powered Performance Analysis in Visual Studio 2026

Author: Harshada Hole

The Copilot Profiler Agent is now available in Visual Studio 2026 Insiders. This AI-powered tool, integrated directly into Visual Studio and powered by GitHub Copilot, serves as a performance coach for developers tackling real-world, production-grade code.

Key Features

  • AI-Driven Bottleneck Detection: Quickly analyzes CPU usage, memory allocations, and runtime behavior to surface the most expensive performance bottlenecks in your code.
  • Actionable Feedback and Suggestions: Offers concrete fix suggestions, generates or optimizes BenchmarkDotNet benchmarks, and guides you through applying improvements.
  • Guided Validation: Validates performance fixes with before/after metrics, ensuring enhancements deliver real gains.
  • Conversational Assistance: Interact with the Profiler Agent using Copilot Chat by tagging (@profiler Why is my app slow?) or using natural language queries.

Real Code, Real Impact

Unlike other tools that excel on simple samples, the Profiler Agent’s true power lies in handling complex, production-critical projects. During testing, it was pointed at the top 100 open-source libraries and applications—such as CSVHelper, NLog, and Serilog. The results included:

  • Discovery of hidden bottlenecks often missed by even experienced engineers
  • Auto-generated benchmarks to ensure performance improvements are valid
  • Tangible fixes, submitted as real pull requests to improve popular libraries

“Saw the YouTube video and it is almost magical. Amazing how it was able to recognize that multiple expression-compiles could be merged into a single expression-compile.” – NLog Maintainer

Developer Experiences: Microsoft Case Studies

Internal adoption across Microsoft teams yielded impressive outcomes. For example, a Principal Engineer recounts how the Profiler Agent guided them to a .NET language feature that optimized memory and execution time, even after consultation with other principal engineers failed to solve the issue:

“After several prompt iterations with the profiler agent, it nudged me toward the realization that .NET supports duck typing for foreach… Honestly, I’m not sure I would have figured this out on my own.”

How to Get Started

  • Download Visual Studio 2026 Insiders
  • Enable the Profiler Agent from the Copilot Chat tool menu
  • Start asking questions (e.g., @profiler Why is my app slow?)

Roadmap

The Profiler Agent currently supports high CPU and memory analysis for .NET workloads, with enhancements planned for future releases. Whether you’re optimizing a service, game engine, or UI, the Profiler Agent is designed to make professional-grade profiling accessible to every developer.

Share your experiences via the short survey and stay up to date with the latest news by following @VS_Debugger and @VisualStudio on Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Democratizing profiling, one performance win at a time.

This post appeared first on “Microsoft VisualStudio Blog”. Read the entire article here