Put Chat/Copilot in its own release notes section

[Apreche]

Since VSCode is a program I use every day, I always read the release notes for every update. The thing is, I am a person who will never use the chat or copilot features. For the past few months the updates to chat/copilot have taken up the majority of the release notes.

I understand that. It’s the hot new thing that is getting most of the attention. That’s fine. The problem is that the release notes are not organized. The normal updates are mixed in together with the chat updates. This makes it very hard to read and find the information I care about.

Please clearly separate the release notes into two distinct sections. One section can have all the information relating to chat, and the other section can have all the other updates.

[iwangbowen]

There's nothing left if they remove AI features from the release notes🤣

[ntrogh]

@Apreche Appreciate your feedback on the release notes. Keep the feedback and suggestions coming!

We organize release updates by their functional area, such as editing code, the overall VS Code experience, source control, and there's also a separate Chat section.
AI updates happen across different functional areas, hence why we split them out. For example, rename suggestions are related to "Code Editing", whereas using semantic search ("dirty files storage") belongs in "Editor Experience". Some users might prefer not to use the chat experience and still find other AI features relevant and useful.

For now, we're not planning to separate out the AI-related updates. We continue to iterate on how we present the updates in our release notes. Thinking out loud: would tagging individual updates be useful, so you can more clearly identify what is relevant to you?

[Apreche]

@ntrogh Taking AI out of the discussion, the more fundamental problem is that for any given user only a portion of the release notes are relevant. Yet, in order to find the relevant parts every user has to skim through the entire document. That’s just a little bit annoying given its structure and length.

Tagging each item is a great idea, as it could make that process a bit easier. What would be even better is the ability to filter the release notes by including and excluding various tags. If the document were filtered in advance, a user could just sit down and read the whole thing.

[ntrogh]

@Apreche Good suggestion. Additional Q: are you mostly reading release notes in-product or on the website?

[Apreche]

@ntrogh I am reading them in-product. If they didn’t pop-up automatically I wouldn’t even remember to check. They are probably the only automatic pop-up that I don’t turn off.

[torchsmith]

I'm with @Apreche on this. I read in-product and I find it hard to skim through all the AI notes to find what matters to me (everything non-ai).