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The latest release of VS Code just dropped, and it's packed full of productivity features, Git enhancements, and tons of AI goodies that we know you're going to love. So, let's get into it.
Let's kick things off and let's talk about chatting agent mode instead of VS Code. And let's talk about models. You've always had awesome models provided out of the box when using GitHub Copilot and VS Code. You can manage the models as well and bring your own key to other model providers like Azure, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and more. You can run models locally on your own machine with Olama. And now there's a new API for developers and model providers to tap into through extensions to have their model show up here.
So here we can see I have Cerebrris and several from the AI toolkit. And that is because I have their extensions installed, which have been updated to use this new API. When I have that installed, we can see that I can easily configure those models with just a single click. I can also tap on C-Pilot and manage the models coming from GitHub Copilot to choose what I want to show up in the model selector. And I picked my favorite here.
Now looking at those models, we can see there's also a new auto mode available. And this is great because it'll automatically select the best model for our request based on capacity and performance. Let's go ahead and select auto.
Now I want to do something here, which is add a new tool specifically to my MCP server just to get comments for a URL. I want to update the documentation and additionally, I wanted to build the project. So let's go and fire that off.
Now I want to show you a few things that are brand new. First, multiple references were being used, including my Copilot instructions, which are the primary way of customizing GitHub Copilot and the agent, but also an agent.mmd file and agents.mds helps in workspaces used by teams that are using multiple AI agents. And you can learn more about this at agents.mmd.
Now, in addition to this, we can see that multiple to-dos have been created. And we can see at the top here that these three to-dos are being tracked. This is great. So I have an insight into what the agent is doing, but also helps improve the agent to handle longer and more complex tasks, and it's automatically collapsed for us, which is great.
All right, it looks like it has gone ahead and added our new tool and is starting to update our documentation. This is another feature I want to point out and change in this release, or the files change at the bottom here. We can see that automatically the files change are collapsed, giving us more room to see what the agent is working on. I can expand them and see in real time the specific files and the lines of code changed. So here it's finalizing our documentation updates.
All right, now it's ready to build our project, and we can see that the agent wants to run a net build command. Now we can allow or skip. Skip is new. This allows us to proceed without executing this command, but keeping the agent going. Now I can allow, or I can from the more actions enable auto-approve. And when I do that, it will configure a subset of commands that run in the terminal autonomously that I have control over. Let's go ahead and enable that.
Now I'm able to configure and allow just the command net build, or the exact command line that is being run here. I can also configure auto-approve. Go into the settings and customize allow and deny list. Let's go ahead and say always allow the command of net build. And now it's going to build our project specifically in the terminal. I can, of course, hover over this and I can get information and see that my shell has rich integration. I also want to point out that auto-approve it here is telling me that the net build was added. So I can tap on it and get information as to why that was automatically run.
And here now it's running our solution. So we can see net build was run again, but automatically because I added it to our allow list, which is absolutely delightful.
All right, our agent has completed, and we can see that Cloud Sonnet 4 was used with a 0.9x multiplier. A new feature that was also added is that when we keep these file changes, the file keeps goes away. So I can start working on a new task.
Now, two other things that I want to show off here. First are AI stats. This is easily configurable and set up in the settings that enable me to show the AI stats versus typing and how many inline suggestions I've completed. You can easily just look for AI stats and enable it there. I also want to point out that I have a new font customization inside the chat. If you type in chat.font, you can now configure your font family and font size.
And those are just some of the updates to chat in HM mode in VS Code. I love working with coding agents, enabling me to delegate tasks off to the background so I can say focus on what I want to work on inside of VS Code. And this release adds a whole bunch of new features, making it easier to work with coding agents.
In our brand new chat sessions pane, we can see all of our local chat history that we have with the chat and with agent mode that we can go ahead and bring up. But we can also see ongoing coding agent tasks that are being worked on. When I hover over one, I can see the pull request that's been open for me. But now I can also see the lines of code changed. Tapping on one will bring up the session of the coding agent directly inside of VS Code. So I can review all the changes that have occurred. I can tap on a file, review it right here. And if I want any changes, look at this. I can simply go ahead and chat directly with the coding agent.
Now, we can also see that new work has been updated here and is being worked on. So, I can track those changes. But what if you want to start brand new task delegation? There's new features inside of VS Code. From this pane, we can simply say new, and we can delegate any work off to the coding agent. And then a session will be started automatically. I can also come in to any of the chat panes and if I'm working on something, I can bring in the entire context or start a new chat and simply say delegate to the coding agent. This will take the work and start a new session right here. And then this new coding agent session will be spun up for me automatically.
Now, on top of that, if you're working on some code and you see a to-do, you can come in to this code action and with a quick fix, you can create a GitHub issue or delegate that to the coding agent as well, making it super easy to delegate more tasks in real time. Track the status and work directly with coding agents, all from VS Code.
Support for checking out multiple branches at once on your local machine with Git Worktree support was recently introduced with VS Code. This is awesome because it makes it easy to test changes or work in parallel without switching contexts, especially when working with agents. So, for example, I'm working on my feedback flow application, and I've been working with agent mode, and I have a bunch of changes here. Now, in my mind, I have a few other features that I want to test out, or for example, I might be running a bunch of tests in parallel. And this is where I can create a worktree.
I'm going to come into my repository here and say worktrees. Create worktree. I'm going to go ahead and work off of main and create a new branch, and I'm going to call it worktree 5. Now this will automatically create a new worktrees folder for me next to my main repository clone. If I open that up, I can see all my worktrees that are here and the branches that are there. So here we can see worktree 1, worktree 2, worktree 5. Now from here I can go ahead and go to worktrees and open it in the current window or in a new window. And then I can have this window on main and a new one open at the same time. So I'm working on multiple branches on my machine.
Now I've gone over and I've started working on this already. I have another instance here of VS Code with worktree 1, and this has gone off with agent mode, and I've been working to update my solution file. If I tap on it here, we can see a bunch of files have been changed. Now, if I want to get this back into the main off of this worktree, there's a new feature in VS Code that helps that out. So, let me switch back over to my main. Here, I'm just going to go ahead and select my main repository and worktree 1 and see the changes. Here we see the main changes to the main and the changes to worktree one. I can tap on that and see the changes.
Now from here I can go in and now type migrate worktree changes. This will go off and ask me which worktree do I want to migrate changes from. And here it's going to go ahead and proceed and take all those changes from that worktree and bring them back into the main. And when I'm done, I can go in and simply delete that worktree, enabling me to work on multiple branches on my local machine, fire off agents across all of them to maximize my productivity.
All right, those are some of my favorites. But what's yours? Be sure to browse the release notes that we'll link below and dive into these features and so many more that are packed into this release. And as always, happy coding.