Auto Approve in workspace isn't applied to MCP tools

[digitarald]

Type: Bug

Had Auto Approve enabled for my workspace, but still got MCP confirmation dialogs.

VS Code version: Code - Insiders 1.103.0-insider (Universal) (141aa85, 2025-07-10T20:22:30.610Z)
OS version: Darwin arm64 24.5.0
Modes:

System Info

Item	Value
CPUs	Apple M4 Pro (14 x 2400)
GPU Status	2d_canvas: enabled canvas_oop_rasterization: enabled_on direct_rendering_display_compositor: disabled_off_ok gpu_compositing: enabled multiple_raster_threads: enabled_on opengl: enabled_on rasterization: enabled raw_draw: disabled_off_ok skia_graphite: enabled_on video_decode: enabled video_encode: enabled webgl: enabled webgl2: enabled webgpu: enabled webnn: disabled_off
Load (avg)	4, 4, 4
Memory (System)	24.00GB (0.08GB free)
Process Argv	--log trace --crash-reporter-id 9b206efe-c338-4f34-baff-2aab1c48a82e
Screen Reader	no
VM	0%

[connor4312]

Auto approve applies to the scope it's defined in. If it's in your workspace, then only MCP servers installed in your workspace get auto approval. To auto-approve tool calls for servers defined at a user level, ensure auto-approve is turned on there.

[digitarald]

Not sure this is easy to reason about, as Auto Approve sais it applies to all tools. This would mean it also doesn't auto-approve extension-provided tools, as they come from the user settings?

Seems a very complicated setting, that should rather be in fine-grained auto-approve settings per MCP server.

[connor4312]

should be a lot better with our refactored tool confirmation logic