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June 11, 2025Quest – I want to move my AI prototype to Azure
June 11, 2025AI Toolkit for VS Code June Update
We are excited to bring you the June update for the AI Toolkit for Visual Studio Code! This month, we are shipping version 0.14.0, which is a major milestone packed with significant new features to enhance your AI development workflow.
We are also thrilled to announce that the AI Toolkit is now part of the new AI Tools extension pack for Visual Studio Code. Plus, we have some exciting new features in pre-release for June.
Let’s dive in! 👇
🎁 What’s New in v0.14.0
This is a major milestone release with significant updates. Here are the highlights:
- ✅ Integrated Evaluation for Agent Builders: We’ve introduced a powerful, streamlined testing suite for your AI agents. You can now seamlessly switch between prompting and evaluation, generate synthetic data using LLMs, import/export datasets (CSV/JSONL), and provide quick feedback on results with thumbs-up/down indicators.
- 📈 Built-in Evaluators for AI Agents: Assess your agents more effectively with new predefined evaluators, including Intent Resolution, Tool Call Accuracy, and Task Adherence.
- 🛠️ Model Conversion and Optimization Tools: Simplify your workflow with new tools for model conversion, quantization (with recipes for Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm NPUs), and optimization, all managed within a customizable workspace.
- 🧠 LoRA Adapter Training for Phi Silica: You can now easily launch fine-tuning jobs on Azure directly from the AI Toolkit. Once training is complete, simply download your LoRA adapter for integration into your Windows AI applications.
- 🤖 Onboarded New Models: We’ve added a wide range of new models, including DeepSeek-V3, Llama-4-Maverick, Phi-4-reasoning, and cohere-command-a, giving you access to the latest advancements in reasoning, code generation, and multimodal capabilities.
📦 Now Part of the AI Tools Extension Pack
The AI Toolkit is now a core component of the newly announced AI Tools extension pack for Visual Studio Code. This extension pack is designed to provide a comprehensive environment for building AI-powered applications and agents, directly within your editor. It brings together a collection of powerful tools to accelerate your workflow, from exploring models and transforming data to developing intelligent agents locally and deploying them to Azure.
🔎 June Pre-release Features
We are also excited to give you a sneak peek at some of the features that are coming in our June pre-release:
- 📞 Function Calling: You will be able to define functions that your AI models can call. You can start from an example or create your own from scratch, enabling more complex and powerful interactions.
- 💾 Version Management: You’ll be able to save new versions of your work, view the version history, and delete old versions as needed.
- 📊 Evaluation Comparison: A new comparison view will allow you to see the differences between the evaluation results of two different versions, making it easier to track progress and make informed decisions.
✅ Get Started and Share Your Feedback
We are incredibly excited about these updates and believe they will help you build amazing AI-powered applications with even greater ease and efficiency.
- 📥 Download the AI Toolkit from the Visual Studio Marketplace.
- 📥 Install the AI Tools extension pack to get the complete suite of tools from the Visual Studio Marketplace.
- 💬 Join our community on GitHub and let us know what you think! Your feedback is invaluable in helping us shape the future of the AI Toolkit.
Thank you for being part of our community. We can’t wait to see what you build! 🚀