VS Code 1.128 Ships Multi-Chat Agent Sessions and GA Copilot Vision
Visual Studio Code 1.128 lets a single Claude agent-host session hold multiple parallel chats and moves Copilot Vision to general availability.
Overview
Microsoft released Visual Studio Code 1.128 on July 8, 2026, adding the ability to run several related chats inside a single Claude agent-host session, moving Copilot Vision’s image and PDF support to general availability, and letting extensions register keyboard shortcuts that fire even when the editor isn’t in focus.
What We Know
The headline feature lets developers keep multiple chats grouped inside one Claude agent-host session in the Agents window instead of spreading them across separate top-level sessions. According to VS Code’s release notes, Claude agent-host sessions “provide agentic coding capabilities powered by Anthropic’s Claude Agent SDK directly in VS Code,” and the new multi-chat support lets users “compare approaches, branch from an earlier turn, and run work in parallel.” Each chat within a session keeps its own history, title, and model selection.
The same release adds quick chats: according to VS Code’s release notes, “For questions not tied to a folder, you can now start a chat in the Agents window without selecting a workspace.” A related, preview-stage feature surfaces subagent activity directly in the interface — when a session delegates work to subagents, according to VS Code’s release notes, “their transcripts appear as read-only peer chats,” letting developers watch delegated work progress without it cluttering the main chat list.
Copilot Vision, which lets developers attach images and PDFs to Chat, reached general availability in this release. Per VS Code’s release notes, “Multimodal support is now generally available in VS Code, starting with this latest release,” and files can be added “by pasting them into Chat, dragging and dropping them, or using the context menu.”
Outside of chat, VS Code 1.128 gives developers more control over the integrated browser and system-level shortcuts. A new workbench.browser.newTabPlacement setting, described in VS Code’s release notes, lets users choose whether browser tabs open in the active editor group (the default), a dedicated side group, or a separate auxiliary window. Separately, VS Code can now contribute OS-level keyboard shortcuts through a new flag in keybinding definitions; according to VS Code’s release notes, “these shortcuts take effect even if VS Code is not in focus.”
For enterprise customers, the release adds administrative control over Copilot’s telemetry pipeline. As VS Code’s release notes put it, “organizations can mandate where GitHub Copilot sends OpenTelemetry (OTel) data, so that telemetry flows to an approved collector.” The release notes also list an experimental option to bring your own model into agent-host Copilot sessions, with configurable sampling parameters.
The GitHub Changelog situates 1.128 within a broader June-to-July release cycle in which GitHub Copilot’s agentic browser tools also reached general availability and Microsoft continued rolling out the ability to organize related work into multiple chats within a single session. nTCompatible independently confirmed the July 8 release date and described the update as part of Microsoft’s continued push to position VS Code as an AI-native development environment built around Anthropic’s Claude Agent SDK.
The update follows VS Code 1.123, released in early June, which introduced cross-machine agent session syncing to GitHub. VS Code 1.128 extends that same agent-session model by letting a single session branch into multiple parallel chats rather than adding new top-level sessions.
What We Don’t Know
Microsoft’s release notes do not disclose usage or adoption figures for the Claude agent-host sessions feature, nor a timeline for when the currently preview-stage read-only subagent chats or the experimental bring-your-own-key agent-host models might reach general availability.
Analysis
The release continues a pattern visible across VS Code’s last several monthly updates: incremental expansion of the Agents window as the editor’s primary AI surface, with session management, model choice, and now multimodal input all converging inside a single agentic workflow rather than being scattered across separate extensions or panels.