Visual Studio Code 1.124

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Welcome to the 1.124 release of Visual Studio Code. This release makes it faster to work across agent sessions and gives agents more autonomy to finish your tasks.

Autopilot

: Autopilot, enabled by default, is now smarter to determine when a task is truly done.

Background sessions

: Quickly send a request in the background and keep composing the next session.

Session navigation

: Search, jump, and step through agent sessions with the keyboard.

Browser history

: Revisit and search pages you've already opened in the integrated browser.

Happy Coding!

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VS Code is rolling out gradually to all users. Use Check for Updates in VS Code to get the latest version immediately.

To try new features as soon as possible,

download the nightly Insiders build

, which includes the latest updates as soon as they are available.

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Agents window (Preview)

The

Agents window

is a dedicated companion window optimized for exploring, iterating on, and reviewing agent sessions across projects and machines. This release focuses on making it faster to move between sessions and on preserving your context across reloads.

Background send for new sessions

Previously, starting a new session meant waiting for it to load before you could compose the next one. You can now send a request in the background instead: press Alt+Enter (or hold Alt and select Send) in the new session view.

The view resets immediately and keeps its state, such as the selected model and context, clearing only the query text, so you can keep queuing up requests. Each started session appears in the sessions list once it commits.

Sending a prompt with Enter still navigates into the new session as before.

Navigate between sessions

When you work across many agent sessions, being able to find and switch between them quickly matters. This release adds several keyboard-driven ways to move through your sessions, from a searchable picker to back and forward navigation and direct jumps by position.

Sessions picker: Press Ctrl+R (Cmd+R on macOS) to open a Quick Pick that lists your sessions in two groups, recently opened and other sessions, with the active session pre-selected. Search across both the session title and its folder, then:

Press Enter to open the selected session.

Press Cmd/Ctrl+Enter to open it to the side.

Press Right Arrow to open it in the background while keeping the picker open.

Screenshot showing the sessions picker Quick Pick with sessions grouped into recently opened and other sessions.

Go back and forward: Press Ctrl+Tab to go back and Ctrl+Shift+Tab to go forward through the sessions you have visited, in most-recently-visited order.

Previous and Next session: The Go to Previous Session and Go to Next Session commands step through the visible sessions list in display order, respecting grouping, filtering, and collapsed sections, and clamp at the list edges. Use Alt+Up / Alt+Down (or Ctrl+PageUp / Ctrl+PageDown; Cmd+Alt+Left / Cmd+Alt+Right on macOS).

Focus a session by position: Press Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+9 (Cmd+1 to Cmd+9 on macOS) to focus the Nth visible session in the grid, left to right.

Restore sessions on reload

Reloading or reopening the Agents window no longer loses your layout. The previously visible sessions and their state are restored automatically, so you land back where you left off. This includes:

The visible sessions grid: which sessions were open, their left-to-right order, the active session, and any sticky or pinned sessions.

Per-session layout, including auxiliary bar visibility, the active view container, and the editors open in each session.

Sessions list state, including the pinned and read status of each session.

Close all sessions

Similar to editor's Close All... commands, you can now close all your sessions in one step with the new Close All Sessions command. This is especially useful when you have many sessions open and want to quickly switch to a new session without having to close each session individually.

Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+K Ctrl+W (Cmd+K Cmd+W on macOS) while a session has focus, or access the command from the Command Palette.

Single-file diff in the Changes view (Preview)

Setting: sessions.changes.openSingleFileDiff

By default, selecting a file in the Changes view opens the multi-file diff editor. To open only the changes for that file, you had to press Alt and select the file (Open Changes).

To always open a focused single-file diff editor when you select a file in the Changes view, enable sessions.changes.openSingleFileDiff . This lets you concentrate on one change at a time without the distraction of other files in the multi-file diff. When the setting is enabled, the redundant Open Changes inline action is hidden.

Widen the editor with the side bar chevron

When you open a file inside the Agents window, a chevron toggle now appears in the editor title bar, to the right of the tabs. Select it to collapse the secondary side bar (auxiliary bar) and widen the editor, and select it again to bring the side bar back. The chevron direction reflects the current side bar visibility.

Autopilot (Preview)

Autopilot is one of the chat

permission levels

that allows agents to take initiative and act autonomously, without needing explicit user approval for each action.

Autopilot is enabled by default

Settings: chat.permissions.default , chat.tools.global.autoApprove

Autopilot is now enabled by default in VS Code. Organizations can still control the visibility and usage of Autopilot via the chat.tools.global.autoApprove setting.

You can configure your default permission level for new chats with chat.permissions.default . Change the current permission level at any time in the chat input box.

Advanced Autopilot

Setting: chat.autopilot.advanced.enabled

Knowing when an agent has truly finished a task is hard. Stop too early and the work is incomplete, loop too long and you waste time and tokens. Advanced Autopilot changes how Autopilot (Preview) decides when to keep iterating and when to finish, so you get more complete results without manually monitoring the loop.

Instead of relying on fixed rules, a small utility model reads a transcript of the chat and decides whether the task is done. The objective that Autopilot works towards is surfaced in a tooltip above the chat, so you can always see what it is trying to accomplish. To keep things bounded, Autopilot loops a maximum of three times before it stops.

Set chat.autopilot.advanced.enabled to true to try this out.

Editor Experience

Create folder when opening folder from simple file dialog

When you are opening a folder from the simple file dialog ( files.simpleDialog.enable ), you can now create a new folder directly from the dialog by typing the name of the folder you want to create and pressing Enter or selecting OK.

Integrated Browser

History

Setting: workbench.browser.maxHistoryEntries

The integrated browser now retains the history of visited pages. History items are surfaced as suggestions when typing in the URL bar, and can be managed using ⌘Y (Windows, Linux Ctrl+H) from within a browser tab. The maximum number of history items to remember can be adjusted via workbench.browser.maxHistoryEntries .

Screenshot showing the URL bar in the integrated browser, with an input of "Wiki" showing several Wikipedia pages from history.

Improved toolbar customizability

Previously, Add Element to Chat and Toggle Developer Tools were the only actions that could be made persistently visible in the right side of the browser toolbar.

Now, all actions that appear within the overflow menu can also be surfaced persistently by right-clicking on the toolbar area to the right of the URL input:

Screenshot showing the context menu allowing the user to toggle visible menu items.

Faster agentic text entry

Previously, typing text and pressing Enter required two separate tool calls. Now, the typeInPage tool supports a submit parameter to allow agents to type text and press Enter in one tool call.

This reduces round-trips for common text-entry scenarios.

Screenshot showing a tool call where the agent typed text into a page and pressed enter.

Enterprise

Enterprise-managed Copilot plugin policies (Experimental)

VS Code now reads policy from the same configuration file that already drives

enterprise plugin standards for Copilot CLI

, so a single policy definition applies to both clients. In the future, VS Code and the CLI will align further on policy management from this shared source.

Enterprise admins can now centrally control which chat plugins and plugin marketplaces are available to developers, instead of asking each developer to configure them locally.

Introduced in 1.123, three new policy-backed settings can be configured through the Copilot enterprise settings file or via existing MDM solutions:

chat.plugins.enabledPlugins : an allowlist of plugin IDs that the organization explicitly enables or disables.

chat.plugins.extraMarketplaces : additional plugin marketplaces the organization wants to make available.

chat.plugins.strictMarketplaces : when enabled, only marketplaces supplied by policy are trusted.

Plugins that are blocked by policy remain visible but appear disabled. Marketplaces that are managed by policy are tagged as such in the marketplace picker.

Deprecated features and settings

None

Thank you

Contributions to our issue tracking:

@gjsjohnmurray (John Murray)

@RedCMD (RedCMD)

@IllusionMH (Andrii Dieiev)

@albertosantini (Alberto Santini)

Contributions to vscode:

@1Burhanuddin (Burhanuddin Mundrawala)

: fix: correct typo occured -> occurred in parcelWatcher.ts comment

PR #319721