Burke Holland works on AI-powered development at GitHub and publishes practical writing, demonstrations and tools for developers. His recent work includes custom instructions for coding agents and examples of interfaces that make an agent’s progress easier to inspect and direct.[1][2][3]
Start with When chat is the wrong UI →
Education
BS in Business Administration / Information Systems
Completed 2002
[2]Links
Website
GitHub 
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Career
Holland’s career includes leading developer relations at Telerik and becoming a principal developer advocate at Microsoft in June 2017. His work includes developer courses, conference demonstrations and material about VS Code, development containers and Copilot. He studied business administration and information systems at the University of Tennessee at Martin, graduating in 2002.[2]
Contributions
Make an agent’s work visible beyond the chat log
When chat is the wrong UI demonstrates custom canvases for tasks such as querying SQLite and managing a development workflow. Holland argues that an interface can expose the state and controls a person needs, while an agent handles parts of the process. His examples move among research, prototyping, planning, implementation and review instead of relying on a sequence of text replies.[1]
Publish a reusable coding-agent workflow
Beast Mode 3.1 is a prompt-based custom chat mode for VS Code. It asks an agent to plan, keep a task list, inspect the codebase and verify its work. Holland explicitly builds on OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 coding-agent cookbook example, adding his own workflow and instructions. It changes how an existing agent is directed; it is not a separately trained model or a guarantee that every task will succeed.[3]
Tools, writing & talks
Writing, research & talks
Start here
When chat is the wrong UIgithub.blogExamples of custom canvases for database work and an agent-assisted development process.
Start with the SQLite example, then look at how the workflow canvas exposes progress and review points. Familiarity with a coding agent helps, but you can understand the interface argument without reproducing the demonstrations.
Author[1]Original source
Tools
- Beast Mode 3.1burkeholland.github.io
A prompt-based custom VS Code chat mode that organizes planning, execution and verification.
Developer, building on OpenAI’s coding-agent example[3]