GitHub Copilot in VS Code, August 2026 releases

What happened

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GitHub Copilot in VS Code shipped four updates throughout August 2026, spanning VS Code v1.132 through v1.135. The releases center on three themes: a reworked Agents window that makes multi-chat sessions easier to manage, a set of chat and review improvements that reduce scrolling and surface richer diff views, and expanded capabilities for the integrated browser and built-in dictation. Agent Host — the process that coordinates agent activity across VS Code windows — also picks up new connection and model-switching options.

This article walks through what changed across all four releases, what the changes mean for developers building or running Copilot agent workflows, how to get the update, and what rough edges to verify before relying on the new features. It is aimed at developers who already use GitHub Copilot in VS Code and want a consolidated read on an active month of shipping.

How it works

VS Code v1.132 through v1.135 add side-by-side chat layout, a /btw side-conversation command that shares the primary chat's context and prompt cache, and a prompt timeline control in the transcript gutter for jumping between prompts and their file changes. The Agents window can now open without a GitHub sign-in when Claude is configured with an API key, and users can switch between models from their Anthropic subscription and their Copilot subscription mid-session. Portable agent plugins following the Agent Plugins 1.0 standard are now installable across VS Code and other compatible agent clients.

Agent Host gains the ability to connect multiple VS Code windows to the same running session, and a new experimental /rubber-duck command lets a complementary model review a session and surface missed edge cases. External sessions created in other Copilot or Claude applications appear in the Sessions list and can be continued directly inside VS Code.

The most significant workflow change is how chats within an agent session can now be arranged and navigated. Chats can be displayed in horizontal or vertical groups, and the layout is restored when returning to a session, so a developer running a long refactor alongside a test-generation task no longer needs to reconstruct their workspace on each open. The /btw command opens a parallel side chat that shares context without interrupting the primary chat, which is useful for quickly asking a clarifying question mid-run without losing thread continuity.

Why it matters

Chat now includes full-text search across the complete conversation transcript with options for case matching, whole words, and regular expressions. Sticky scroll pins the current prompt at the top while scrolling through long responses. Token usage — broken out as input, cached input, and output — appears per model per turn when hovering the response footer, which matters for developers trying to reason about cost or quota consumption across multi-model turns.

The updates ship with VS Code itself. Download or update to the latest release from code.visualstudio.com and the GitHub Copilot extension updates automatically through the Extensions panel. The full release notes for v1.132, v1.133, v1.134, and v1.135 are indexed at aka.ms/VSCode/Release, where each version is listed separately. No separate extension version pin is required; the Copilot extension picks up the new Agents window features as long as VS Code is current.

Who is affected

For the features that depend on Agent Host — multi-window session sharing, the /rubber-duck command, and session continuation from external apps — verify that the Copilot extension has fully updated and restart VS Code after the update completes. The /btw side-conversation command and the Agent Plugins 1.0 installer are available without additional configuration once the VS Code version is current.

Several features in these releases are explicitly experimental. Opening the Agents window without GitHub sign-in when using a Claude API key requires enabling an experimental setting manually; it is not on by default. The /rubber-duck command is also flagged experimental, meaning GitHub can change or remove it before it stabilizes. The hybrid Markdown editor that combines diff viewing and editing in one pane is similarly experimental. Builders who depend on any of these should not treat them as stable API surface for automated workflows until GitHub marks them generally available.

Agent Plugins 1.0 compatibility spans VS Code and other compatible agent clients, but the changelog does not enumerate which other clients qualify. Developers distributing agent customizations as plugins should verify installation behavior on each target client before publishing. The integrated browser's automatic HTML reload on disk change and the option to set it as the default HTML editor both require configuring editor associations in VS Code settings; neither activates on its own.

What to watch next

The Agent Host introduction video linked from the changelog covers the multi-window session and session-continuation features in more detail for developers who prefer a visual walkthrough. GitHub Universe is the likely venue for announcements about which experimental features graduate to stable, particularly the Agents window sign-in bypass and /rubber-duck, given that several experimental Copilot features from earlier in 2026 have reached general availability at conference milestones.

The dictation updates — multi-language on-device recognition, workspace-level transcript instructions, and shell-aware cleanup for terminal commands — are worth a separate evaluation pass for developers who already use voice input. The shell-aware cleanup in particular changes how spoken punctuation is handled when dictating into a terminal, which affects any command that includes literal characters like dots, slashes, or hyphens. Test dictation into a terminal buffer after upgrading to confirm the cleanup behavior matches your preferred command style.