Visual Studio Code stabilizes agent mode

Visual Studio Code stabilizes agent mode

Visual Studio Code 1.99, the latest release of Microsoft’s popular code editor, is now available. Highlights of the update center on GitHub Copilot agent mode, Next Edit Suggestions, and Copilot chat.

Developers can access Visual Studio Code 1.99, also known as the March 2025 release, through code.visualstudio.com. VS Code is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

In the VS Code 1.99 release, unveiled April 3, agent mode becomes part of VS Code Stable. With chat agent mode, developers can use natural language to define a high-level task and start an agentic code editing session. In agent mode, GitHub Copilot autonomously plans the work needed and selects relevant files and context, then makes edits to a code base and invokes tools to accomplish the developer’s request. Agent mode monitors the outcome of edits and tools and iterates to resolve issues. Developers can sign up for a GitHub Copilot subscription through the GitHub Copilot Free plan. Agent mode also features an experimental thinking tool that can give a model the opportunity to think between tool calls.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers are now supported in agent mode. MCP provides a standard method for AI to interact with external tools, applications, and data sources. When users input a chat prompt using agent mode in VS Code, the model can invoke tools to perform tasks such as accessing databases, file operations, or retrieving web data. This integration enables more dynamic, context-aware coding assistance, according to Microsoft.

For AI-powered code editing, Next Edit Suggestions now is generally available. Improvements include making suggestions more compact, less interfering with surrounding code, and easier to read at a glance. In addition, updates to the gutter indicator have been made to ensure suggestions are more easily noticeable. Other Copilot-related improvements include muting diagnostics events outside the editor when rewriting a file with AI edits, and saving files explicitly when the user decides to keep AI edits. Syntax highlighting for inline suggestions now is enabled by default.

VS Code 1.99 follows last month’s VS Code 1.98, which also brought enhancements for GitHub Copilot. Also in Visual Studio Code 1.99:

  • AI-powered editing support for notebooks now is available in VS Code Stable. VS Code also now provides a dedicated tool for creating new Jupyter notebooks directly from chat.
  • Improvements have been made to the reference picker that is used for various source control operations such as checkout, merge, rebase, or delete branch. The updated reference picker contains the details of the last commit (author, commit message, commit date), along with ahead/behind information for local branches.
  • Enhanced IntelliSense for the code CLI brings support for subcommands to the code, code-insiders, and code-tunnel commands.
  • For simplification, the terminal tab by default now shows much less detail.
  • The shell integration PowerShell script now is signed. This means shell integration on Windows when using the default PowerShell execution policy ofRemoteSignednow should start working automatically.
  • With a BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) preview, GitHub Copilot Pro and GitHub Copilot Free users now can bring their own API keys for popular providers such as Azure, Anthropic, Gemini, OpenAI, Ollama, and Open Router.
  • Beginning with VS Code 1.99, prebuilt servers distributed by VS Code are only compatible with Linux distributions that are based on glibc 2.28 or later.