For the last few years, Visual Studio Code has delivered new major updates each month.Now, those updates will arrive once a week, and the first weekly update has some helpful changes to AI agents.The team explained in a blog post, “With the move to weekly Stable releases, we continue to improve our engineering processes to ship high-quality features at a faster pace.” If this first release is any indication, the weekly updates will individually have fewer changes than the monthly updates, but they’ll add up over the course of the month.
Now, if one specific feature is ready, you won’t have to wait another 2-3 weeks to try it out.Microsoft didn’t mention why Visual Studio Code is switching to weekly releases, but the editor’s pivot to AI code editing is probably the main reason.New generative AI models for code editing are arriving at a rapid pace—Claude Opus 4.5 was released in November 2025, followed by Opus 4.6 was rolled out in February, while OpenAI is updating its GPT models at least once a month.
New features in the models, MCP-based tools, and other aspects of AI coding usually require changes to the editor for full functionality.Now, Visual Studio Code can more easily keep up with those updates, and potentially stop some people from switching to Google Antigravity and other AI-focused IDEs.The first of these weekly updates, Visual Studio Code version 1.111, is focused almost entirely on AI coding improvements.
There’s a new permissions picker in the Chat view to change how much autonomy is granted to an agent, ranging from the standard approval settings to the fully unrestricted ‘Autopilot’ mode.You can also now use agent debug events as context in a chat, allowing you to ask AI agents about customizations, token consumption, or other troubleshooting tasks.Since there are constant changes to the AI chat interface, Visual Studio Code has revamped the chat tips to show more useful information.
Helpful tips about using the Plan agent and creating a custom agent are shown first, and only later will you see information about experimental settings or generating Mermaid diagrams.That should make the tips less confusing for newcomers to AI coding.Finally, the original Edit Mode for AI coding is officially deprecated in this release, and will be removed in version 1.125.
You can use the chat.editMode.hidden setting for now to get it back, but agent-based editing will be the main supported method in future updates.Subscribe to the newsletter for clear VS Code AI rundowns Make the newsletter your guide to VS Code's AI tooling and agent controls—subscribe for focused explanations, practical breakdowns, and clear context that help you understand new editor features and agent-based editing choices.Get Updates By subscribing, you agree to receive newsletter and marketing emails, and accept our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
You can unsubscribe anytime.You can download Visual Studio Code from the official website.If you already have it installed, go to Help > Check for Updates (Linux and Windows) or Code > Check for Updates (macOS) to get the new version.
Source: Visual Studio Code
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