Best of AI-Assisted Development — October 2025

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   Article

   ASP.NET Blog·30w

   Introducing Custom Agents for .NET Developers: C# Expert & WinForms Expert

   Microsoft released two experimental custom agents for GitHub Copilot targeting .NET developers: C# Expert and WinForms Expert. C# Expert provides guidance on modern C# best practices, code integrity, and testing workflows. WinForms Expert specializes in UI design patterns, event-driven programming, and protects designer.cs files from corruption. Both agents can be downloaded from the awesome-copilot repository and integrated into projects via the .github/agents folder, with support across Copilot Coding Agent, VS Code Insiders, and upcoming Visual Studio 2022 v17.14.21.

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   Article

   Kiro·32w

   The wait(list) is over, get started with Kiro today

   Kiro, an AI-powered IDE from AWS, has removed its waitlist and is now publicly available. New users receive 500 free bonus credits (50% of the Pro plan) valid for 30 days. Version 0.4.0 introduces spec-driven development features including optional MVP tasks, per-prompt credit consumption visibility, dev server integration, and the ability to reference specs as context. The IDE uses a unified credit system that meters usage in 0.01 increments, with different models consuming credits at varying rates.

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3. 3
   Article

   Kiro·29w

   This is Kiroween

   Kiro announces Kiroween, a Halloween-themed hackathon with $100,000 in prizes across 12 categories. Participants build applications using Kiro's agentic IDE features including specs, agent hooks, steering, and MCP. The competition runs from October 31 to December 5, 2025, with categories like Resurrection, Frankenstein, Skeleton Crew, and Costume Contest, plus a special $10,000 startup prize. All participants receive Kiro Pro+ tier access during the submission period.

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4. 4
   Article

   Visual Studio Blog·31w

   Introducing Planning in Visual Studio (Public Preview)

   Visual Studio 2022 17.14 introduces Planning in Chat, a public preview feature that enables GitHub Copilot to handle complex, multi-step coding tasks through structured plans. Instead of simple prompts, Copilot now creates markdown-based plans that break down large tasks, research codebases, and execute steps iteratively while adapting to new context. The feature uses transparent tool calls and hierarchical planning techniques, showing 15% higher success rates in SWE-bench testing. Plans are stored as temporary files with progress tracking, allowing developers to monitor and control each step of the AI-assisted workflow.

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