Visual Assist AI Capabilities
Visual Assist integrates AI through VA Intelligence, a set of optional capabilities intended to extend existing editing workflows rather than replace them.
The AI is a complement to navigation, refactoring, and code inspection. These features rely on parsing and explicit rules, making results predictable.
The VA Intelligence is aimed at open-ended tasks where the developer’s intent cannot be anticipated in advance.
Visual Assist AI Functions
The AI integration with Visual Assist is focused on:
making AI assistance feel more responsive, transparent, and better integrated into normal Visual Studio workflows.
Keep in mind that no data leaves your computer, ensuring your code remains private and secure.
Visual Assist AI Access
AI functionality is available through VA Intelligence. It is disabled by default. For security and safety, you need to give permission to both install and run the AI.
Requirements:
- Install it on your local machine using your GPU hardware.
- Permissions: Navigate to VAssistX – Options – VA Intelligence – Enable Explain with AI + Install
- Disk space: At least 9 GB of free space
- Minimum hardware requirements: GPU with at least 12 GB of VRAM.
Once VA Intelligence is installed, the Explain Code with AI and Change Code with AI features are available inside Visual Assist without separate add-ons.
The AI experience is intentionally kept close to existing editor interactions so you can invoke it from the same workflow you use for inspection, quick actions, and code review. You have to select code, ask for help or a change, and evaluate the result in place.
Recommended Scope
- Use AI when the change is easy to describe but awkward to perform manually or with a fixed refactoring command.
- Use AI explanations when you want fast, local, conversational help understanding unfamiliar code.
- Keep selections focused enough that the diff remains easy to evaluate.
- Treat the output as proposed code, not automatically trusted code.