Welcome to the February 2026 release of Visual Studio Code. This release makes agents practical for longer-running and more complex tasks, giving you more control and visibility, new ways to extend agents, and smarter session management.

Agent plugins: install prepackaged bundles of skills, tools, and hooks from the Extensions view

Agentic browser tools: let the agent drive the browser to interact with your app and verify its own changes

Session memory: persist plans and guidance across conversation turns

Context compaction: manually compact conversation history to free up context space

Fork a chat session: create a new, independent session that inherits conversation history to explore alternative approaches

Agent Debug panel: get real-time visibility into agent events, tool calls, and loaded customizations

Chat accessibility: use chat to its fullest with screen reader improvements, keyboard navigation, and notification signals

Create agent customizations from chat: generate prompts, skills, agents, and hooks directly from a conversation

Kitty graphics protocol: render high-fidelity images directly in the integrated terminal

For the complete release notes go to Updates on code.visualstudio.com.

Insiders: Want to see new features as soon as possible? You can download the nightly Insiders build and try the latest updates as soon as they are available. And for the latest Visual Studio Code news, updates, and content, follow us on Twitter @code!

Happy Coding!

The update addresses these issues
.

For the complete release notes go to Updates on code.visualstudio.com.

The update addresses these issues.

For the complete release notes go to Updates on code.visualstudio.com.

The update addresses these issues, including a fix for a security vulnerability.

For the complete release notes go to Updates on code.visualstudio.com.

Welcome to the January 2026 release of Visual Studio Code. In this release, we are further evolving VS Code to make it the home for multi-agent development.

• Chat UX: chat just feels better and snappier with faster streaming, improved reasoning results, and a revamped editor inline chat

• Agent Session Management: it's now easier to delegate tasks to agents across local, background, and cloud and jump in when needed

• Agent Customization: build your own workflows using agent orchestrations, and have consistent results with Agent Skills and organization-wide customizations

• Agent Extensibility: reuse your knowledge with Claude agent support and new Anthropic model capabilities, and enjoy rich chat interactions with MCP Apps

• Agent Optimizations: agents work smarter with Copilot Memory and experience faster code search with external indexing

• Agent Security & Trust: feel confident running terminal commands with sandboxing and effective auto-approval rules

• Workbench & productivity: test your apps without leaving the editor with the new integrated browser

The update addresses these issues.

For the complete release notes go to Updates on code.visualstudio.com.

The update addresses these issues.

For the complete release notes go to Updates on code.visualstudio.com.

Welcome to the December 2025 release of Visual Studio Code.

Traditionally, the month of December is a time where our team focuses on cleaning up GitHub issues and pull requests across our repositories. This year, we managed to reduce our open issues by nearly 6,000 and triaged over a thousand more.

In addition to our housekeeping efforts, we have also made several improvements and feature updates across various areas of VS Code.

Happy Coding!

The update addresses these issues.

For the complete release notes go to Updates on code.visualstudio.com.

Welcome to the November 2025 release of Visual Studio Code. There are many updates in this version that we hope you'll like, some of the key highlights include:

VS Code now includes Agent HQ, background agents and custom agents for your org.

• Agent HQ: You can use GitHub Copilot alongside your other coding agents to complete multiple tasks. Leverage background, cloud, or local agents and their relative strengths for the right job, all at the same time.
• Background agents work in their own isolated workspaces, managed for you by VS Code.
• Custom agents for organizations: Your team can now share custom agents at the org level.