VS Code: Agent Host Improvements and Chat Enhancements
Microsoft's VS Code team merged 20 pull requests focused on Agent Host functionality, chat session management, and offline capabilities. Key improvements include skill completions, session archiving, and BYOK offline UI support.
Duration: PT1M53S
Transcript
Good morning, this is your VS Code developer briefing for May 15th, 2026.
The team merged 20 pull requests yesterday, delivering significant improvements to Agent Host and chat functionality.
Don Jayamanne merged three major contributions. First, completions service and slash command support for Copilot CLI, introducing the IAgentHostCompletions interface and CopilotSlashCommandCompletionProvider. Second, skill completions for Agent Host, adding the AgentHostSkillCompletionProvider with metadata preservation. Third, archived state management and worktree sharing for chat sessions, introducing an archived property in ChatSessionMetadataFile and blocking sibling session utilities.
Connor Peet merged soft reconnect capabilities for the remote Agent Host protocol client, persisting the protocol client across transport drops with automatic recovery and request buffering.
Dmitriy Vasyura delivered two chat UI improvements - enabling chat UI for offline scenarios under the chat.offlineByok switch, and improved offline BYOK state management with persistent session restoration.
Kyle Cutler restyled the 'add element to chat' picker with element highlighting on right-click. Anthony Kim enabled input/output UI for Agent Host tool calls, restoring the clean interface from the previous chat extension.
Additional improvements include quota error handling for Claude CLI by Paul Wang, chronicle session folding by Vijay Upadya, and GPT-5.4 large prompt as default by Dileep Yavan.
What's next: The team continues expanding Agent Host capabilities with enhanced completion support and improved session management. Offline chat functionality development progresses with BYOK model integration.
That's your VS Code update for today. We'll be back tomorrow with more development news.