Visual Studio Code v1.117 Changelog

This update is all about making VS Code's AI helpers feel faster and more customizable. It matters most to developers who use AI coding assistants daily, especially teams that need to use specific AI models for security or cost reasons. It also brings a bunch of quality-of-life improvements to how the terminal and chat features work together.

What's new

• Bring Your Own Key (BYOK): If your school or company uses Copilot Business or Enterprise, you can now connect your own API keys (basically passwords for specific AI services) to use models from places like Google, OpenAI, or Ollama right inside the VS Code chat. Admins can control this if they need to.
• VS Code Agents App (Insiders only): There's a new companion app for the "Insiders" (experimental) version of VS Code. It gives you a dedicated space to run multiple AI agent tasks at the same time across different code folders. You can also start "sub-sessions" to branch off your work without losing your place.

Improvements

• Smoother chat streaming: Instead of waiting for the AI to finish a whole paragraph before showing it, the chat now "streams" the text block-by-block as it arrives. It feels much faster, and you can even customize how the text pops onto the screen (like making it fade or slide in).
• Sorting agent sessions: If you have a lot of ongoing AI chats (agent sessions), you can now sort them by the most recently updated. It makes it much easier to find where you left off.
• Background terminal alerts: When an AI agent runs a long command in the background, VS Code will now send a system notification in the chat so you can check its status without having to switch back to the terminal window.
• Better terminal titles: When you run AI command-line tools (like Copilot CLI, Claude Code, or Gemini CLI), the terminal used to just say "node." Now, it smartently detects which tool is running and labels the terminal tab clearly so you don't get confused.
• Inline code changes: In the new Agents app, when the AI edits your code, the way it shows the differences (diffs) is cleaner and easier to read.

Fixes

• Terminal profile crash: Previously, if your default terminal was set to a non-standard shell (like fish on Mac/Linux or Git Bash on Windows), trying to open the GitHub Copilot CLI would crash with an error. This is fixed.
• TypeScript bugs: VS Code updated to TypeScript 6.0.3, which fixes a few annoying bugs and regressions (things that used to work but accidentally broke in an older update) related to importing files.
• App crashes and memory leaks: Community members helped fix several behind-the-scenes bugs, including a crash caused by empty entries in launch files, and a few "listener leaks" (which happen when a program forgets to clean up background processes, eventually slowing down your computer).

Breaking changes

No breaking changes in this release.