Microsoft has updated Visual Studio Code (VS Code), the most popular programmer’s editor, with Agent HQ alongside numerous agentic coding updates, a preview of TypeScript 7 support, and deprecation of IntelliCode code completion in favor of subscription-based GitHub Copilot.

Agentic coding is the hot thing in AI-assisted development, with the formation of the just-announced Agentic AI Foundation and recent releases from VS Code competitors including Google’s Antigravity and JetBrains Air in preview.

Not wanting to be left behind, VS Code now enables multiple background agents to work concurrently, and introduces Agent HQ as a single place to manage them. Oddly, although “VS Code now includes Agent HQ” is touted as the first new feature in the release notes, the term is not mentioned again. This GitHub post explains that Agent HQ is not a feature, but rather a direction towards integrating agents from multiple vendors into the coding workflow.

Earlier this week, an official video presented Agent HQ in VS Code, but the feature shown is the preview of Agent Sessions view. Despite the presenter’s enthusiasm for this, the latest release disables this view by default, because agent sessions are now integrated into Chat. “If you prefer to keep using the standalone view, you can re-enable it via chat.agentSessionsViewLocation,” the release notes state, though adding: “in a future release, we plan to remove the standalone view entirely.”

Leaving aside the Agent HQ confusion, there are 10 new agent features in the update, including keeping agents active while chat is closed, moving agent sessions from local to cloud, customizing background agents, running custom subagents, and sharing agents across an organization.

AI agents can speed productivity but there are security concerns over issues such as prompt injection, where a malicious instruction reaches the agent, or AI mishaps arising from the inherent unreliability of generative AI – such as a recent case where Google’s Antigravity wiped an entire hard drive partition.

We noticed that VS Code has a specific YOLO (you only live once) option which disables manual approval completely for all tools in all workspaces. It is off by default, and the setting description states that “this feature disables critical security protections and makes it much easier for an attacker to compromise the machine.” The fact that this setting exists though is a vulnerability, showing perhaps the conflict between Microsoft’s desire to keep up in the AI agent wars, and the necessity for common sense security.

TypeScript 7 is a big forthcoming release, introducing a new compiler and language service written in Go for native code performance. According to principal product manager Daniel Rosenwasser, TypeScript 7 is far enough advanced that trying the native preview is worth it for developers. “You can expect faster load times, less memory usage, and a more snappy/responsive editor,” he said.

In this update, VS Code adds an experimental option to enable TypeScript 7, provided that TypeScript Go is installed and configured, which will then be used for TypeScript and JavaScript language features.

The team also mentions that the VS Code build scripts are now all in TypeScript, where before they were a mix of TypeScript and JavaScript. This has been enabled by TypeScript support in Node.js 22.18 and higher, showing the progress of TypeScript as a language that developers can use without friction.

IntelliCode, which provides AI-assisted code completions (with a local model) for a number of languages including Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java and C#, has been deprecated. Language servers will still provide code completion, syntax highlighting and more, but for AI-assisted completions, which came for free with IntelliCode, developers will now need to use Copilot. Copilot has 2,000 free completions per month after which a subscription is required. The IntelliCode extension has over 60 million users and is rated well by devleopers. “Why is this extension being deprecated and being migrated to Copilot?” asks one. Subscriptions may well be the answer, showing once again that although VS Code is open source and offers much for free, it is also driven by Microsoft with its own commercial goals.

The new release will likely be the last major update until February 2026 as the monthly update cycle skips December.