Visual Studio Code v1.113 Changelog

This update is all about making AI helpers (often called "agents") smarter and easier to manage. If you use AI to write or debug code, this release gives you way more control over how the AI thinks, how it handles images, and how it connects to outside tools, making your whole workflow smoother.

What's new

• Centralized Chat Settings: There is a new "Chat Customizations" dashboard. Instead of hunting through menus, you can manage all your AI instructions, custom agents, and plugins in one place. It even has a built-in code editor to help you write these settings.
• Control AI "Thinking" Effort: Some AI models can "reason" or think through a problem before answering. You can now choose how hard the AI thinks (like Low, Medium, or High) right from the model drop-down menu, and the editor remembers your choice.
• Full-Screen Image Viewer: If you or the AI add pictures to the chat (like screenshots), you can now click them to open a full-screen viewer. You can zoom, pan, and click through all the images in your chat history.
• Nested Subagents: "Subagents" are mini-AI assistants that handle specific tasks. They can now trigger *other* subagents to do multi-step jobs. (This was previously blocked to stop infinite loops, but you can now turn it on if you need complex automation).
• Plugin Marketplaces: There's a new menu to easily browse, find, and remove AI plugins (add-ons that give the AI extra skills). You can even install them by clicking special web links.
• Fresh Themes: The built-in light and dark color themes have been updated for a cleaner, modern look.

Improvements

• Better Tool Sharing for CLI Agents: "MCP servers" are external tools that give AI extra abilities (like reading a database). These tools can now be shared with AI agents running in your computer's terminal (Command Line Interface), not just the ones inside the VS Code editor.
• Forking Chat Sessions: "Forking" means making a copy of a conversation so you can try a different idea without losing your original chat. You can now do this with terminal-based AI agents, too.
• Debug Logs for Terminal Agents: If you want to see exactly what an AI agent is doing behind the scenes, the "Debug Log" panel now works for terminal agents, not just the local editor agents.
• More Reliable Claude Session History: VS Code now uses Claude's official system to load your past chat history. Before, it read raw text files which could break easily, causing missing messages. This is much more stable now.

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where Claude AI agents would sometimes miss showing your previous chat sessions or messages. By switching to the official API (the software bridge between VS Code and Claude), your history now loads reliably without getting out of sync.

Breaking changes

No breaking changes in this release.