Building Declarative Agents for Copilot with API Plugins in VS Code

Organizations run on custom data, and standard AI assistants often lack access to your specific external databases. By building custom declarative agents, you can bridge this gap and bring real-time data directly into your Copilot workspace. In this text-based course, you will learn how to design, configure, and deploy declarative agents using Visual Studio Code. You will discover how to extend these agents with API plugins, enabling them to securely fetch and interact with external systems. What you'll learn: Understand the foundational architecture of declarative agents and how they extend Copilot; Configure agent manifests and definitions using Visual Studio Code; Design API plugins using modern OpenAPI specifications to define custom actions; Connect agents to external data sources to retrieve real-time information; Apply secure communication practices for API plugin authentication; Test and debug your custom agent behaviors directly within your workspace. This course begins with the essential concepts of declarative agents before guiding you through hands-on configuration files, API schema definitions, and integration steps using step-by-step written explanations and code examples. This course is designed for developers and IT professionals new to AI extensibility; no prior experience with agent development is required, though a basic understanding of JSON and APIs is helpful. Start building custom AI actions to streamline your team's workflow today.