Remove invalid tools list from whats-new-from-release-notes agent

[Copilot]

The tools property in the agent frontmatter listed unrecognized aliases (githubread, lexical-code-search, semantic-code-search). Unrecognized names are silently ignored, so the agent launched with no tools at all — unable to read, edit, create, or search files. This caused PR #36983 to fail.

• Removed the tools block from .github/agents/whats-new-from-release-notes.agent.md
• When tools is omitted, the agent gets all available tools by default (read, edit, search, execute, github/*)

# Before — invalid tool names, silently ignored → agent gets nothing
tools:
  - githubread
  - lexical-code-search
  - semantic-code-search

# After — property removed, agent gets all tools by default

[Added by WadePickett]
The tools that were needed but not loaded are listed in this error that was returning when the agent was run:
""Status: Blocked — agent environment misconfigured. This session only has report_progress and skill tools available. File I/O (bash, view, edit, create), GitHub API (get_file_contents), and code search tools are all missing. No changes were made.

Original prompt

The custom agent at .github/agents/whats-new-from-release-notes.agent.md has an invalid tools property in its YAML frontmatter that prevents the agent from having any file operation tools when it runs.

The current frontmatter includes:

tools:
  - githubread
  - lexical-code-search
  - semantic-code-search

These tool names (githubread, lexical-code-search, semantic-code-search) are not recognized tool aliases for the Copilot cloud agent. The valid tool aliases are read, edit, search, execute, and github/*. Unrecognized tool names are silently ignored, which means the agent launches with no tools at all — it can't read, edit, create, or search files.

This caused PR #36983 to fail completely — the agent reported: "session had no file operation tools (bash, edit, view, grep, glob) available. Only report_progress and skill were provisioned."

Fix: Remove the tools property entirely from the YAML frontmatter in .github/agents/whats-new-from-release-notes.agent.md. When tools is omitted, the agent gets access to all available tools by default, which is the desired behavior since the agent needs to read files from dotnet/core, create include files, edit the What's New article, and search the repository.

The corrected frontmatter should be:

---
name: whats-new-release-notes
description: >
  Creates or updates the "What's New in ASP.NET Core" release notes article
  by generating include files from dotnet/core preview release notes and
  adding them to the What's New article in dotnet/AspNetCore.Docs.
  Use this agent when processing new .NET preview release notes into the
  What's New article, or when checking for incremental updates to
  already-processed release notes.
ai-usage: ai-assisted
author: tdykstra
ms.author: wpickett
ms.date: 03/11/2026
---

Only remove lines 10-13 (the tools: block). Do not change anything else in the file.

The following is the prior conversation context from the user's chat exploration (may be truncated):

User: The tools needed for this agent to run were not loaded. what lines should be added to the agent and where so that next time it has all the tools it needs? Or is there a different way this should be done and not done as an agent?

Assistant:

Let me investigate the PR and the agent configuration to understand what's going on here.

Assistant: Now let me look at how the Copilot coding agent is configured in this repository:

Assistant: Now I can see the issue clearly. Let me look at what tools the agent declares vs. what it actually needs:

Assistant: Now I have a clear picture. Let me look at the PR's description more carefully and check the agent file's tools property.

The issue is clear from both the PR description and the agent configuration. Here's the analysis:

The Problem

The PR description states exactly what went wrong:

Status: Blocked — session had no file operation tools (bash, edit, view, grep, glob) available. Only report_progress and skill were provisioned. Needs re-run with full tooling.

The agent file at .github/agents/whats-new-from-release-notes.agent.md has this in its YAML frontmatter:

tools:
  - githubread
  - lexical-code-search
  - semantic-code-search

The tools list only includes read-only tools. The Copilot coding agent (cloud agent) needs file operation tools to actually create and edit files in the repository. Because the tools property was explicitly set to a restrictive list, the agent was denied access to the tools it needs to write files — edit, read, search, and execute (shell/bash).

The Fix

According to the Custom agents configuration docs, the available tool aliases for cloud agent are:

Alias	Cloud Agent Mapping	Purpose
execute	Shell tools: bash or powershell	Execute commands
read	view	Read file contents
edit	str_replace, str_replace_editor	Edit/create files
search	search	Search for files or text

Line 10-13 in .github/agents/whats-new-from-release-notes.agent.md should be changed from:

tools:
  - githubread
  - lexical-code-search
  - semantic-code-search

to one of these options:

Option A: Remove the tools property entirely (recommended)

Simply delete lines 10-13. When tools is omitted, the agent gets access to all available tools by default, including file editing, shell execution, search, and the built-in GitHub MCP server. This is the simplest and most robust fix.

Option B: Explicitly list the needed tools

tools:
  - read
  - edit
  - search
  ...

</details>



<!-- START COPILOT CODING AGENT SUFFIX -->

*This pull request was created from Copilot chat.*
>

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#### Internal previews

| 📄 File | 🔗 Preview link |
|:--|:--|
| [.github/agents/whats-new-from-release-notes.agent.md](https://github.com/dotnet/AspNetCore.Docs/blob/feb83923586abd16584e0322c84185aa832dee96/.github/agents/whats-new-from-release-notes.agent.md) | [.github/agents/whats-new-from-release-notes.agent](https://review.learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/.github/agents/whats-new-from-release-notes.agent?branch=pr-en-us-36984) |

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[wadepickett]

Approved.

[wadepickett]

@tdykstra, Need your review/approval: I needed to remove the tools section. The tools were named incorrectly so they didn't load, but by default if zero tools were specified, all tools available would have loaded anyway which is what was needed. So removing the tool list from this agent for creating the What's New articles.