Use the VS Code Agents application (Insiders)

The Visual Studio Code Agents application is a separate app, installed alongside VS Code, built for the agent-first experience. The Agents application gives you access to all your workspaces without needing to open each one individually in a separate window. You can run multiple sessions in parallel across all your projects, all from one place.

The Agents application shares your sessions with the main VS Code window, so you can switch between them at any time.

In this article, you learn about the VS Code Agents application and how to start and manage agent sessions across your projects.

Prerequisites

The Agents application is installed together with VS Code Insiders. It doesn't require a separate download or installation.

• Visual Studio Code Insiders installed. Download VS Code Insiders.
• Access to GitHub Copilot. Follow the steps in Set up GitHub Copilot in VS Code to sign in and activate your subscription.

Code-first vs. agent-first

There are two primary ways to work with AI in VS Code:

• Code-first: you write code in the editor and use AI as a coding assistant to help you implement features, fix bugs, and refactor code. Your primary interface is the editor for editing code, testing, and debugging. You use AI to enhance your existing coding workflow.

• Agent-first: you build applications by handing off (high-level) tasks to an AI agent. The agent plans, implements, and verifies the result. Your primary interface is chat and the sessions list for organizing work, while the editor is a secondary interface for reviewing and tweaking the AI's implementation when necessary. You use AI to shift how you work and focus more on defining the problem and reviewing solutions.

The Agents application is built for the agent-first approach. It provides a focused environment for managing agent sessions across all your projects, with chat as the central interface for interacting with your agents. The Agents application is a complement to VS Code, which is optimized for the code-first approach.

Open the Agents application

The Agents application is a separate application that runs alongside your main VS Code window. To open the Agents application, use one of the following methods:

• Open the Agents application directly from your Start menu or Applications folder by launching Visual Studio Code Agents - Insiders (Windows and macOS).

  Note

  The option to launch the Agents application from the OS is currently not available on Linux. You can still access the Agents application on Linux through the command line or from within VS Code.

• In VS Code, select the Agents icon in the title bar or run Chat: Open Agents Application from the Command Palette (⇧⌘P (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+P)).

  You can also open the Agents application directly from the VS Code welcome page.

• Run code-insiders --agents from the command line.

The Agents application requires GitHub authentication to access your Copilot subscription and sessions. After first launch, you'll be signed in to GitHub if you've already signed in within VS Code .

Interface overview

The Agents application picks up your existing Copilot CLI, Cloud, and Claude agent sessions across your workspaces. You can switch between agent sessions across the different workspaces without needing to open each workspace in a separate window.

The Agents window has the following main areas:

1. Sessions list: in the sidebar, where you can view and manage all your sessions across workspaces. By default, sessions are grouped by workspace. Right-click a session to see more commands, such as renaming, marking as done, pinning, and more.

2. Customizations panel: below the sessions list, where you can access your agent customizations to tailor the agent behavior to your workflow and preferences.

3. Chat area: in the center, where you see the chat conversation history and where you can interact with the agent through prompts.

4. Changes panel: on the right, where you can review file changes and other artifacts generated by your agent during a session, and view a file explorer of the workspace.

Start an agent session

The Agents application and VS Code share the same underlying agent sessions (Copilot CLI, Copilot cloud, and Claude agent). This means that any session you start in the Agents application is immediately available in VS Code.

To start a new agent session in the Agents application:

1. Select New at the top of the sidebar or press ⌘N (Windows, Linux Ctrl+N).

   

2. Use the workspace dropdown to select a local folder or GitHub repository for your chat session.

   The type of agent is determined by the type of workspace you select:

   • Folder: choose between the Copilot CLI or Claude agent to start a new session. You can select Continue In to hand off the session to a Copilot Cloud agent at any time during the session.
   • Repository: sessions started in a GitHub repository use the Copilot cloud agent.

   You can directly start a session scoped to a specific workspace by hovering over a workspace in the sessions list and selecting +.

   Tip

   You can track and create sessions that run on a remote machine via SSH or a dev tunnel. See Open a session on a remote machine for more information.

3. If the folder or repository you select isn't trusted yet, you'll be prompted to trust it before you can start a session.

4. For Copilot CLI sessions, choose between folder and worktree isolation for the session.

   With worktree isolation, the agent operates in a separate folder created by Git worktree, which keeps changes isolated from your main workspace until you're ready to merge them.

   With folder isolation, the agent operates directly in your main workspace, and changes are applied directly to your files. This is the default behavior for non-Git projects.

   Optionally, select a source control branch to base the session on.

   

5. Optionally, select a custom agent and language model for the session. You can change these at any point during the session.

6. Type a prompt that describes what you want to accomplish, and press Enter.

   The agent breaks down your task into steps, writes code, runs commands, and self-corrects when something goes wrong. Continue the conversation to refine the results or change direction.

Manage and review file changes

The Changes panel in the Agents application provides a dedicated view with detailed information about the files and agent edits made during a session. The Changes panel is split into two main tabs:

• Files tab: a file explorer view of all files in the workspace.
• Changes tab: a list of files that have been changed, added, or deleted by the agent. Select the Branch Changes dropdown to choose which changes to view.

To review changes made by the agent, select a file in the Changes tab to open a diff view that shows the edits the agent has made compared to the current state of the workspace. While reviewing the changes in the diff view, you can comment directly in the file to signal the agent to make adjustments.

You can open the diff view side-by-side with the Chat view inside the Agents application or open it in a modal window to focus on the changes. Use the layout controls in the diff view toolbar to toggle between different display modes.

After reviewing the changes, the Changes panel provides the following options to act on the edits made by the agent:

• Commit: when using folder isolation, commit the changes made by the agent directly to your workspace.
• Merge: when using worktree isolation, merge (and optionally sync upstream) and create a pull request.
• Checkout: for Copilot Cloud sessions, check out the branch associated with the session's pull request locally to review or request further edits.