In the last day or so, Microsoft has pushed its latest weekly release of Visual Studio Code, version 1.119. This update focuses on agent-browser interaction, optimized token usage, OpenTelemetry tracing, trust and developer efficiency, and markdown preview.
With this update, Microsoft has made it easier to share tabs from the integrated browser so that the agent can interact with it. You can do this by attaching specific tabs to the chat, when you do this it enters a sharing state where the agent can read and interact with the page. With this update, the agents also have information about how many browser tabs you have open and are not shared, they can also request to share an open tab if they need to interact with a page and you can approve or deny this request.
Coding agents do have tight usage limits, so Microsoft has decided to offload todo list management to lightweight background agents so that the main model can focus on the actual task. The smaller model will use fewer tokens, so it helps to extend your usage. Right now, this feature is disabled by default as it is experimental.
An interesting new feature in this update is support for OpenTelemetry. As agent sessions grow and become more autonomous, understanding what an agent has done and how long steps took and where tokens were spent will become more important. With OpenTelemetry you can monitor this. Models that support this so far include Copilot Chat agent sessions, Copilot CLI background agent, and the Claude agent.
To make the agentic experience more fluid, Microsoft has added a setting to remove network domain blocking so that you get sandbox protection, minus constant interruptions for network access.
Finally, this update makes it easier to switch the current editor back and forth to the Markdown preview. While this feature has been in VS Code for a while, it was overlooked, but now there are new buttons and commands to make it more discoverable. In a Markdown file, look for the button in the toolbar with the tooltip “Switch to Preview View”. From the preview, you can find another button to “Switch to Editor View”.
VS Code will inform you when the update is available, or you can download it from the Visual Studio Code website.
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