Visual Studio Code 1.138 makes agents portable, persistent, and ready to jump between apps
The latest monthly update pushes Microsoft's Agent Host architecture from concept into the day-to-day editor.
Microsoft shipped Visual Studio Code 1.138 today, September 16, 2026. It arrives as the usual monthly stable release, but this one quietly makes a bet the company placed months ago feel real.
The bet is that editors shouldn't look like chat boxes anymore. They should hold onto long-running "agent" sessions that keep working even after you close the folder or step away from the machine. Microsoft has been building the plumbing for that since late 2025. With 1.138, a lot of it finally shows up.
The core is the Agent Host, a dedicated background process that "owns" a session so the work no longer depends on one window. That architecture got a deep-dive blog post on August 26, written by Rob Lourens, Connor Peet, and Brigit Murtaugh. It was theory then. This release starts turning it into behavior.
The portable-session bets
The most concrete change is running agent sessions inside local Dev Containers. Enable one new setting and VS Code spins up the conversation inside your project's container instead of against your bare machine. The agent now works against the same toolchain and dependencies the project actually expects.
You won't need to hunt for this one manually. Local folders with a supported Dev Container config pick up a "Use Dev Container" action straight from the workspace picker. Docker still has to be installed on the box, though.
It's in Preview and rolling out gradually, so the setting may sit disabled until Microsoft flips it. Manual today if it hasn't auto-enabled for you yet.
The second story is Codex, and it's the most interesting part. Microsoft now lets you pull Codex (OpenAI's coding agent) through either a GitHub Copilot subscription or a ChatGPT one. Signed in to both? You can switch between them mid-conversation, right from the model picker, without dropping what you were doing.
You can also hand the same session between the standalone ChatGPT app and VS Code. Configure the ChatGPT app for computer use, and Codex in VS Code can reuse that setup to drive desktop apps on your machine, using whichever subscription you've got going.
It can use the full VS Code toolset too. Built-in tools, extension tools, MCP tools. With a ChatGPT-backed model, it can even call an image-generation tool directly inside the session.
There's a smaller touch as well: Codex quick chats can now attach to a local folder, either directly or as an isolated worktree. It carries over the session title, history, current request, chosen model, and permission mode. Works for idle chats in Interactive mode, at least for now.
Tidying up, then the bigger picture
The third bucket is "session hygiene," which sounds boring but matters.
When all of a session's pull requests merge, the Agents window can flag it Mark as Done. Two settings, both off by default, can then auto-mark merged sessions done and delete them after a grace period you set. There's also a confetti animation that fires when a session completes. It respects reduced-motion preferences, for what it's worth.
Related work lets PRs be created straight from a session, and a badge can light up on the dock, launcher, or taskbar when something needs attention. Fewer context switches is the pitch.
You might also notice the candid bit: the release notes page itself carries a disclaimer that they were generated using GitHub Copilot and might contain inaccuracies. You're reading reporting on reporting generated by an AI. The details above come from the official updates page and that August 26 Agent Host post, cross-checked against 1.137.
Not everything here is about agents. There are the fixes nobody writes headlines about but everyone notices when they're missing. A main-process out-of-memory crash tied to unconsumed buffered pty host events, fixed by Jacob T. Jove. A memory leak in the markers table, caught by Simon Siefke. Terminal shift-drop corrections, and a change forcing commit-message output to UTF-8. Microsoft also updated OpenTelemetry docs to match the new architecture.
The boldest element is arguably the Agent Host Protocol itself. By standardizing how clients and hosts talk, Microsoft is basically inviting third parties to build their own AHP clients. Rust, TypeScript, Kotlin, Go, and Swift libraries already exist. That's a platform play wearing code-editor clothes.
It's an ambitious set of changes, though not all of it lands at once. Much of it lives behind a setting or a Preview toggle, so don't expect the full stack to be live the moment you install. It arguably competes with how you'd expect an editor to behave, yet the pieces fit into something coherent.
If you want 1.138 now, open Check for Updates inside VS Code. The nightly Insiders build gets features sooner, and it's rolling out to everyone regardless of build channel. Downloads cover Windows (x64, Arm64), macOS (Universal, Intel, Apple Silicon), and Linux (.deb, .rpm, tarball, Arm, snap).
Head here to download the release.
