The March 2025 release of Visual Studio Code, aka 1.99, was released few days ago.

The new release introduced chat agent mode for VS Code Stable, which can be enabled by setting chat.agent.enabled.

With chat agent mode in Visual Studio Code, you can use natural language define a high-level task and to start an agentic code editing session to accomplish that task.

image from visualstudio.com

It also extended the agent mode with more features. It now supports Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers in agent mode, which offers a standardized method for AI models to discover and interact with external tools, applications, and data sources.

There are as well several new built-in tools added to agent mode, including:

• a thinking tool (Experimental) inspired by Anthropic’s research.
• fetch tool, for including content from a publicly accessible webpage in prompt.
• and usages tool – a combination of “Find All References”, “Find Implementation”, and “Go to Definition”.

Other enhancements include ability to create a new workspace (Experimental), run tools and terminal commands, and VS Code extension tools made available in agent mode.

The Copilot Pro and Copilot Free now support user’s own API keys for popular providers such as Azure, Anthropic, Gemini, Open AI, Ollama, and Open Router. Meaning it can now use new models that are not natively supported by Copilot.

The chat now support attaching images from any browser via drag and drop, though they must have the correct url extension, with .jpg, .png, .gif, .webp, or .bmp. And, it now offers a single unified Chat view, allows to easily switch between Ask, Edit, and Agent mode.

For Linux and Windows, there’s a new window.controlsStyle setting to switch window controls between native, custom, and hidden mode. And code editing now has general availability of Next Edit Suggestions (NES).

Other changes include:

• New instant indexing support, to build the remote workspace index when you first try to ask a #codebase/@workspace question.
• Copilot status menu enabled for all users, with ability to view workspace index status at any time.
• Experimental feature to show functional chat experiences out of the box.
• AI-powered semantic text search enabled by default in the Search view
• Experimental Tree-Sitter based syntax highlighting.
• Syntax highlighting for inline suggestions enabled by default.
• AI-powered editing support for notebooks
• Bump default nbformat from 4.2 to 4.5.
• New dedicated tool for creating new Jupyter notebooks directly from chat.
• Add notebook cell outputs, such as text, errors, and images, directly to chat as context.
• End Linux legacy server support.

For more about VS Code 1.99, see the official release note.

Get Visual Studio Code 1.99

VS Code offers pre-build packages for Linux, Windows, and macOS which are available to download in its website via the link below:

For Ubuntu Linux, besides installing the official deb and snap packages, there’s also Flatpak package available for choice. And here’s a step by step guide shows how to install them in Ubuntu.