VS CODE WITH COPILOT

VS Code is the client most likely to look broken while working perfectly. Three things about it differ from every other editor, none of them produce an error message, and all three have the same symptom: Copilot tells you flatly that it is not connected to Astryke.

1. Point it at the Hub

Command palette, then "MCP: Open User Configuration"

{
  "servers": {
    "astryke-hub": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://app.astryke.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

2. Approve it in the browser

Open Copilot Chat and switch the mode dropdown to Agent. MCP tools do not appear in Ask or Edit mode.

Sign-in happens in a browser window your editor opens. There is no API key and nothing to paste back, so no secret ever lands in a chat window or on disk. Approving mints a token tied to that one machine, which you can revoke on its own later.

Do not open the server address in a browser yourself. It is an API endpoint, not a sign-in page. If you find yourself trying to authorize by hand, step 1 did not take and that is what to fix.

3. Check it worked

Ask your agent to call get_brief, or use the /catch-up command if your editor surfaces MCP prompts. On a new account you get an empty board. That is the correct answer, not a failure: Astryke does not invent a placeholder project. Tell the agent what you are working on and it fills it in.

4. Give it a reason to use the Hub

This is the step everyone skips. MCP is pull-only, so connecting gives your agent the ability to read your board and no reason to bother. Without a standing instruction the tools sit there and you carry on being asked what you were working on.

Append this to .github/copilot-instructions.md, the file VS Code with Copilot reads at the start of every session. Do not overwrite what is already in there.

# Astryke Hub

At the START of every session, call the get_brief tool from the
astryke-hub MCP server before answering anything about my projects.
It tells you what I am working on, what each project is waiting on,
and which decisions are already settled. Do not ask me what I was
doing - look first.

Before you finish meaningful work, call report_progress so the next
session knows what happened.

If you hit a fork only I can settle, call ask_question instead of
guessing.

Then read the file back and check the tool names are spelled exactly as above. On Windows, if your agent writes this file through PowerShell, a backtick before a letter is an escape character and will silently eat part of a tool name. A quoted get_brief has arrived on disk as get_brie, and nothing reports an error. The call just never works.

Your trial starts here

The 14 days begin when you connect your first agent, not when you sign up. Nothing is counting while you read this.

The three ways this goes wrong

The key is “servers”, not “mcpServers”

Nearly every other MCP client uses mcpServers. VS Code uses servers and ignores the other spelling without complaint. If you copied a config from another tool’s documentation, this is almost certainly your problem.

There is no ~/.copilot/mcp_servers.json

That path does not exist and nothing reads it. It comes up because coding agents asked to set this up invent it, confidently, and then report success. If a file by that name appeared on your machine, delete it and use the command palette instead.

The tools only exist in Agent mode

Copilot Chat has a mode dropdown. In Ask and Edit mode, MCP tools are not offered at all, so Copilot will tell you it has no Astryke connection and be describing its own situation accurately. Switch the dropdown to Agent.

There is a second version of this: a chat opened before the server finished connecting keeps the tool list it started with for its whole life. Start a new chat after connecting, rather than reloading the window and reusing the old one.

Why the file and not the CLI

VS Code has a code --add-mcp command that takes the whole JSON blob as one argument. Quoting that correctly differs between PowerShell, cmd and bash, which puts a shell-quoting puzzle in the one step that has to work first time. Editing the file has no such trap.

Still stuck? Troubleshooting, or every config format side by side.