Getting YOLO mode in GitHub Copilot with VS Code

12 November 2025

Recently I've been semi-vibing a data processing pipeline. Don't worry, the output is easy to check and I'm not making anyone else read or otherwise deal with this code. Anyhoo, VS Code has some bugs which mean that the "auto-approve" functionality doesn't work terribly well (vscode#273415, vscode#266651, vscode#274133, etc.). I am developing in a Codespace container and for the purposes of this project I feel pretty good about letting the AI do whatever it wants without badgering me all the time. Even if it was actively malicious, at worst it could trash my private GitHub repo. That would be unfortunate but not a tragedy.

As far as I can tell reading around online there used to be an explicit "YOLO mode" in the preferences but this seems to have disappeared. There's an auto-approve setting where you can choose which commands (or regexes matching commands) are allowed. Unfortunately, even though /.*/ is documented as "allow every command" this simply doesn't work and one ends up having to click "Approve" a lot.

The good news is that the YOLO setting remains although it's a little hard to find. (A Microsoft employee mentions it in the second issue above.) The trick is that you need to open the remote settings JSON for your codespace—it doesn't work if you set it locally—and enable chat.tools.global.autoApprove.

So if you Command-Shift-P, choose Preferences: Open Remote Settings (JSON).

Then inside the global { ... } JSON object, add:

    "chat.tools.global.autoApprove": true,

Now, the first time GitHub Copilot tries to run a command in a given session you'll get a dialog box asking you to confirm YOLO mode. You say yes, and then it will blissfully go ahead and run all the commands it wants to. Magnificent.

Tech Tidbits Blog by Thomas Karpiniec
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