Visual Studio Code 1.137 landed on September 9, 2026, and if the last several releases were about making agents capable, this one is about making them ambient — running on schedules, listening by voice, and reaching into GitHub without you ever leaving the editor. It also marks a milestone the team has been building toward for months: the agent host architecture, now the foundation under almost everything new here.

The headline features:

  1. Automations (Preview) — schedule recurring agent tasks to run hourly, daily, or weekly, or kick them off on demand
  2. Voice Mode (Experimental) — talk with an agent and interrupt or redirect it while it works on your code
  3. Continue quick chats in a workspace — attach a project to an existing chat without losing its history or current request
  4. GitHub issues and pull requests (Experimental) — review issue and PR details directly in the Agents window, even when the repository isn’t open

Let’s break down what each of these means for your daily workflow — plus the smaller, sharper edges that make a release feel polished.

Automations (Preview): Agents That Run on Your Schedule

Automations let you schedule recurring agent tasks so routine work doesn’t have to be started manually. Start from a template — catching up on changes, triaging issues, or finding bugs — or define your own prompt and schedule.

To try it, enable chat.automations.enabled, open the Agents window, and select Automations in the sidebar. From there you can run an automation on demand or schedule it to run hourly, daily, or weekly. The feature is in Preview and rolling out gradually, and there’s documentation to get you started.

Why this matters

Until now, using an agent was fundamentally a manual act: you open the window, type a prompt, and supervise. Automations invert that. A nightly dependency audit, a Monday-morning triage of new issues, an hourly scan for regressions — these are tasks where the prompt is always the same and only the timing changes. Formalizing that as a scheduled agent task means the work happens whether or not you remember to ask.

It’s also a signal about where VS Code is headed: the agent host is now capable of long-running, unattended work, not just conversational turns. That’s the difference between a tool you drive and a teammate that shows up on its own.

Voice Mode (Experimental): Talk to Your Agent

Voice Mode enables a natural, spoken conversation with an agent while it works on your code. Enable agents.voice.enabled and select the Voice Mode button in the chat input to try it.

The interaction model is the interesting part. While the agent is speaking, you can start speaking — or use the push-to-talk shortcut — to interrupt the response and continue the conversation. This isn’t a one-shot dictation box; it’s a flowing exchange where you can redirect the agent mid-task.

Voice Mode is also session-aware. It can answer questions about your running sessions, the selected model, and attached files, and you can even ask it to start a new session. When it routes a request, it announces whether it’s sending it to an existing session or starting a new one — a small but important bit of transparency.

You can customize it in several ways:

  • agents.voice.showTranscript shows the conversation transcript in the chat input, with controls to show/hide it and mute or unmute your microphone without ending the voice session
  • Run Chat: Dictate: Select Microphone from the Command Palette to choose the input device used by both dictation and Voice Mode
  • agents.voice.voice selects the voice that reads responses aloud
  • Run Voice Mode: Show Introduction to reopen the intro, where you can select a microphone and preview available voices

Right-click the Voice Mode button for quick access to its configuration, instructions, introduction, microphone selection, and transcript controls. Administrators can disable Voice Mode by turning off Copilot preview features for the organization.

Why this matters

Dictation already proved that voice is a real input path for code work, but dictation is one-directional — you speak, it transcribes. Voice Mode is a conversation, with interruption being the key affordance. Being able to say “no, stop, do it this way instead” mid-turn is exactly how you’d work with a human colleague, and it lines up with a broader accessibility story: hands-free, eyes-free interaction with an increasingly capable agent.

Continue Quick Chats in a Workspace

Quick chats are the lightweight, no-workspace conversations you start in the Agents window — great for general questions or ideas. The problem was always what happens when a quick chat turns out to be about a project. Historically, you’d have to start over.

In 1.137, you can attach a local folder to an existing quick chat and keep going. After you confirm the workspace and choose whether to use the folder directly or create an isolated worktree, the chat becomes a workspace session. Critically, it retains its title, conversation history, and current request, and the agent automatically continues with access to the project files when workspace setup finishes.

If you’d rather not convert the chat, you can simply start the project work in a new workspace session instead.

One caveat: continuing a chat conversation in a workspace session is currently available only in the Copilot harness.

Why this matters

This is the agent host paying off. Because sessions are decoupled from workspaces, a chat can survive the transition from “no folder” to “real project.” That’s a small convenience on its face, but it removes a genuine friction point: the moment you realize a casual question has become real work, you no longer have to lose everything you’ve already discussed.

GitHub Issues and Pull Requests in the Agents Window (Experimental)

When a chat conversation references work on GitHub, the Agents window can now integrate directly with the GitHub Pull Requests extension. Select a github.com issue or pull request link and its details open directly in the Agents window — no browser switch required. This works even when you don’t have a workspace open for that repository.

To try this initial integration, install the GitHub Pull Requests extension in your default VS Code profile and enable extensions.experimental.enableAgentsWindowCapability.

There’s a second, related capability that may end up being the more useful one: attaching GitHub issues and PRs as context in any chat. Add an issue or PR from the Add Context… menu in any chat input — the Chat view, Chat editor, or Agents window — and the issue description, comments, or pull request changes become available to the agent without copying them into your prompt. You can also paste a GitHub issue or PR URL into the new-session input; the URL stays in your prompt and a context attachment is added automatically.

Why this matters

Context-switching is a tax on focus, and “go read the issue in a browser, then come back and describe it” is one of the more annoying ones. Pulling issue and PR context into the session — and letting the agent reason about the discussion and the code together — closes a loop that used to require manual translation between two tools.

The Agent Host Underneath It All

Several of these features rest on the agent host, which lets you connect to the same agent session from multiple VS Code windows. It runs agent harnesses in a dedicated process based on the open Agent Host Protocol (AHP), and its Copilot agent is powered by the Copilot SDK — which aligns the agent’s behavior and functionality with the Copilot CLI, the standalone GitHub Copilot app, and other Copilot products.

The host also brings agent-queued messages: when an agent uses the send_message session-management tool to contact a chat that’s already busy, VS Code queues the message and starts it after the active turn completes successfully. An agent can queue multiple messages for chats in the same session or another session, and they’re processed in the order they were sent — which makes multi-chat workflows considerably more predictable.

If you want the deeper story, the team published an agent host architecture blog post explaining why they built it, what it enables, and how the protocol works.

A few quality-of-life improvements are worth calling out because they touch every agent-heavy workflow.

Smart diff editor layout. You can now choose a diff layout the same way across regular diffs, multi-file diffs, and the Agents window Changes editor. Open More Actions (…) > Diff View and select Inline, Side by Side, or Automatic. The Automatic option shows which layout is active and adapts as the editor width changes — and if you deliberately widen an inline diff by dragging a sash, it stays inline while you resize so the content doesn’t shift unexpectedly.

Binary files in multi-file diffs. Changed binary files, such as images, now remain visible in multi-file diffs instead of being omitted. The diff shows a Binary file changed placeholder in the file’s original position, and you can select Open Diff to review it in the standard diff experience, such as an image diff or an applicable custom editor. Multi-file diffs in editor windows now also share the same visual design as those in the Agents window.

GitHub links in the Markdown editor (Experimental). With markdown.experimental.richLinks.enabled, GitHub issue and pull request links in the Markdown editor show the current title and state, so you can understand each reference without opening it first — and the link updates when the issue or PR state changes, including CI updates. Set chat.experimental.richLinks.enabled to get the same rendering in chat.

Help Name the VS Code Pet

Not everything in 1.137 is about agents. The experimental VS Code pet is an interactive companion that reacts as you work with agents. Enter /vscode-pet in chat to meet it — then help choose its name.

From September 10 through September 17, 2026, you can submit a name for the VS Code pet. The contest terms and conditions have the details. It’s a light, community-minded touch in an otherwise automation-heavy release — and honestly, a welcome one.

Also in This Release

  • The Story of VS Code: The VS Code documentary is out. Watch it at aka.ms/the-story-of-vs-code to see how the editor and its community evolved.
  • GitHub Pull Requests extension: Faster opening of the pull request webview, and all github.com links in VS Code now open with the extension (disable with githubPullRequests.openPullLinks). See the changelog for 0.166.0.

Community Contributions

VS Code 1.137 includes contributions from a broad set of community contributors. Notable highlights:

  • Simon Siefke continued an extraordinary run of memory leak fixes — this release: git branch protection provider, extension host pseudoterminals, accessible view toolbar, test results, extension host comments, mainThreadNotebook, and the terminal profile service
  • Arthur Cnops (accnops) used dedicated MAI transcription for dictation
  • Brian Steenhoek (bstee615) added and recognized an eagerness option in the PatchBased02Unified prompt strategy
  • Michael Cummings (mcumming) enabled Microsoft Entra ID sign-in for Private Marketplace access and made extensions.gallery.authProvider policy-controlled
  • Hadley Wickham fixed a webview view badge that wouldn’t clear when set to undefined
  • Piyush Madan added showing the remaining turns to execution subagents
  • YOSHII-Hiroto added support for opening MHTML files in the integrated browser
  • Wibaek Park fixed the find input being refocused during IME composition

Issue tracking contributions from John Murray, RedCMD, Andrii Dieiev, and Alberto Santini helped triage and verify community reports.

Should You Update?

Yes. VS Code 1.137 is the release where agents start working without you asking — and that’s a meaningful shift. Automations is the headline for that reason: it turns the agent into something you can schedule rather than babysit. Voice Mode is the most interesting experiment, and if you’ve ever wanted to keep your hands on the keyboard while redirecting an agent, it’s worth enabling. The GitHub issue and PR integration, meanwhile, quietly removes one of the most common sources of context-switching in a normal bug-fixing day.

No deprecated features or settings in this release, so there’s nothing to clean up after updating.

VS Code is rolling out gradually to all users. Use Check for Updates in VS Code to get the latest version immediately, or download the nightly Insiders build to try new features as soon as they’re available.

What’s your favorite feature in VS Code 1.137? Let us know on X — we’re always interested in hearing how these updates land in real workflows.