Microsoft’s February update to Visual Studio Code, version 1.110, places a continued emphasis on artificial intelligence features within the popular source code editor. The latest release introduces deeper insights into chat sessions and experimental support for agent plugins, allowing developers to customize chat interactions with tailored settings.
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More Control, Detailed Insights, and Chat Summaries
Building on the capabilities introduced in version 1.109, users can now interact with the Claude Agent SDK with expanded functionality. Developers can send additional messages during a conversation with the AI to refine the agent’s approach or submit further requests.
A new preview feature, the Agent Debug Panel, replaces the Chat Action Diagnostics. This panel provides developers with real-time insights into chat events, including system prompts and tool calls. Users can view the prompt files, skills, hooks, and other customizations loaded for each session, simplifying troubleshooting of agent configurations. This enhanced visibility reflects a broader trend toward explainable AI and developer control.
The panel can be accessed via the command palette using Developer: Open Agent Debug Panel. Alternatively, developers can click the gear icon in the upper corner of the chat view and select Demonstrate Agent Logs.
VS Code 1.110 includes the new Agent Debug Panel.
(Image: Microsoft)
To maintain context in longer conversations, the new Context Compaction feature automatically summarizes previous exchanges when the context window reaches its limit. Developers can also manually trigger this summarization by typing /compact into the chat input field. The command can be enriched with additional instructions to focus the summary on a specific aspect.
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Experimental Agent Plugins
As an experimental feature, developers can now utilize agent plugins – pre-built collections of chat customizations. These plugins can contain skills, commands, agents, MCP servers, and hooks. They can be installed from the Extensions view by searching for @agentPlugins or by running Chat: Plugins from the command palette.
By default, plugins from the GitHub repositories copilot-plugins and awesome-copilot are displayed, but it’s also possible to specify additional sources, such as private repositories or local directories.
VS Code 1.110 enables the installation of agent plugins.
(Image: Microsoft)
New Features for Accessibility and Graphics Rendering
Beyond AI, other improvements have been integrated into VS Code, including enhanced accessibility. The chat question carousel is now fully accessible for screen reader users. The editor also plays an accessibility signal and displays a notification whenever the chat poses a question or requires confirmation. These cues appear even when the user is in another window.
For rendering high-fidelity graphics directly in the terminal, VS Code now supports the Kitty graphics protocol. Yet, some features of the protocol are not yet available, including animations and Unicode placeholders.
Details on these and other new features in Visual Studio Code 1.110 are available in the release announcement.
(mai)
