Harald Kirschner is principal product manager for Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot at Microsoft. He works on the editor’s AI experience, combining product strategy, user feedback and developer-tool integration.[1]
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Links
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X · digitarald Principal Product Manager, VS Code & GitHub Copilot · Microsoft
Career
Kirschner’s résumé dates his principal product-manager role to August 2023, following senior product management for VS Code from October 2020. Earlier Mozilla roles spanned partner engineering, platform performance and developer experience, including Firefox Developer Tools. He earned a Dipl.-Ing. (FH) in Multimedia Engineering at Hochschule Mittweida in 2009. His career connects software engineering and design with the measurement and product work behind developer platforms.[1]
Contributions
Connect an editor agent to external systems
Kirschner wrote VS Code’s explanation of adopting the Model Context Protocol. MCP gives agents a consistent interface to tools and services beyond the current workspace. His article explains the shift from editor-specific extension APIs toward a protocol that supports shared integrations, with explicit attention to user control and authorization.[3]
An agent can return an interface
With Connor Peet, Kirschner introduced MCP Apps support in VS Code. A tool call can return an interactive component inside the conversation: a sortable list, flame graph or feature-flag picker. The user can directly inspect data and change a selection instead of describing every adjustment in text. Their examples make visual interaction a part of the agent’s workflow.[4]
Tools, writing & talks
Writing, research & talks
Start here
Beyond the tools, adding MCP in VS Codecode.visualstudio.comExplains how VS Code connects agents to external services through a common protocol and user-controlled integrations.
Read the MCP introduction first if you have used an editor agent but have not connected external services. It establishes the integration model before the MCP Apps article adds interactive interfaces.
Author[3]A Microsoft VS Code product lead details how the team moved to weekly releases with agents: agent-ready codebases, mandatory AI code review, telemetry-driven auto-fix PRs, staged rollouts, and eval-driven learning, including the CI and token-cost problems that surfaced.
Catalog workOriginal source- Giving Agents a Visual Voicecode.visualstudio.com
Shows interactive MCP tool results such as flame graphs, sortable lists and configuration pickers.
Coauthor[4]