Visual Studio Code 1.140 Adds Multi-Folder Sessions and Agent Delegation
Visual Studio Code 1.140 introduces expanded agent workflows, experimental multi-folder session support, and new remote delegation capabilities.
Visual Studio Code 1.140 introduces advanced AI agent coordination and remote task management.
- The 1.140 release adds a new Copilot harness for consistent agent behavior across the GitHub Copilot ecosystem.
- Experimental support for multi-folder sessions allows users to manage tasks across different repositories or worktrees within a single agent session.
- New remote delegation features enable users to assign tasks to connected remote agent hosts, optimizing resource management.
- HydraFusion, currently in research preview, offers automated model orchestration for selecting and coordinating models during coding tasks.
Overview of VS Code 1.140
Microsoft has released version 1.140 of Visual Studio Code, focusing heavily on enhancing AI agent workflows and developer productivity through improved repository management. This update includes several experimental features aimed at better integrating automated assistants into the standard coding experience while providing more control over environment configurations.
The Copilot Harness
A primary addition in this release is the Copilot harness. Designed to provide a unified experience, the harness aligns agent behavior across various Copilot-branded products, such as the standalone GitHub Copilot application and the CLI. By running within a dedicated agent host process that utilizes the Agent Host Protocol (AHP), the harness allows developers to maintain consistent agent sessions across multiple editor windows. Users can enable this feature by selecting the Copilot harness from the chat input's harness picker.
Multi-Folder Session Support
For developers working on complex projects, the introduction of multi-folder sessions provides a way to coordinate activities across different repositories or isolated worktrees. Previously, sessions were largely bound to a single folder or checkout. The new experimental implementation allows each chat to operate in its own folder or worktree, ensuring that terminal tasks, changes, and pull request states do not bleed between independent chats. This feature is currently disabled by default and requires modification of the settings.json file to activate for specific harnesses like Copilot, Claude, or Codex.
Remote Delegation and Infrastructure
The 1.140 update also emphasizes efficient resource allocation through remote delegation. Users can now delegate tasks from the Agents window to remote host machines, which can automatically place work based on hardware resources such as CPU, memory, and OS requirements. Complementing this is the improvement in Dev Container management, where VS Code now supports automatic cleanup of idle containers after five minutes of inactivity, along with faster startup times by reusing cached dependencies across projects.
Model Orchestration with HydraFusion
In a research preview phase, Microsoft has introduced HydraFusion, an adaptive model orchestration system. The goal of this tool is to automate the selection of models and workflows for coding tasks. Rather than requiring the developer to manually determine which model is appropriate for a specific sub-task, HydraFusion can independently decide to solve a task using an initial model, escalate to a more capable model if necessary, or assign a secondary model to critique and refine the output. This aims to balance the cost and speed of AI operations while maintaining output quality.
Worktree Reuse
To assist with performance and disk space management, VS Code 1.140 introduces improvements for worktree reuse. Developers can now reuse ignored folders—such as those containing installed dependencies—across different worktrees. This approach avoids the need to repeatedly run installation commands or maintain multiple copies of large build artifacts, contributing to faster environment setup times.
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