Image: Microsoft / code.visualstudio.com VS Code 1.136 Ships Agent Merge: Coding Agents That Fix Review Feedback and Merge Their Own PRs
The September 2 release adds Agent Merge preview — a loop where an agent addresses review comments, fixes failed checks, resolves conflicts, and reruns workflows until the PR is ready to merge.
VS Code 1.136 came out September 2, 2026. The headline feature is Agent Merge, a preview capability that closes one of the last remaining gaps in automated PR workflows: actually getting the PR merged.
Agent Merge
Agent Merge takes over after a pull request is open. When triggered, it asks a coding agent to read through reviewer comments, address the feedback, fix any failed CI checks or merge conflicts, then rerun the workflows. It repeats the loop until the PR is ready to merge.
This isn’t just about automation for automation’s sake. The practical problem it solves is the context-switching cost of coming back to a PR after review. Instead of loading the whole thing back into your head a day later, you can hand it off and the agent cycles through the fix-and-check loop on its own.
The feature is off by default. You enable it with chat.agentMerge.enabled in settings. It’s labeled as preview, so expect rough edges.
Multi-root workspace support for agents
Copilot and Claude agent sessions now work across multiple folders in a multi-root workspace. Previously, agents were scoped to a single folder. Now they can resolve workspaces by project name: “run this in the vscode workspace” works without you providing an absolute path or URI.
Agent hooks still scope to a single folder. If multiple folders in your workspace define hooks, VS Code prompts you to pick a primary one.
Session organization
The Agents window got a hierarchy. Related chats now appear as children of their parent session, with titles, statuses, and pending approvals visible at a glance. If you’ve been running multiple agent sessions across different windows, this is a meaningful quality-of-life improvement — instead of a flat list of unrelated sessions, you can tell at a glance which chats belong together.
Alongside the hierarchy, VS Code can now send notifications when an agent needs your input or finishes work. That’s particularly useful when you’ve delegated a task and moved on to something else in another window.
Chat backgrounds
A lighter feature, but worth noting: you can now customize the Agents window with a decorative background. Either pick from built-in VS Code icon patterns or use your own image via “Chat: Set Background…” This is the kind of thing that sounds unnecessary until you’re distinguishing between eight open agent windows.
Enterprise: on-device dictation
Administrators can now configure dictation to use on-device transcription and disable language-model cleanup, keeping voice input local. This matters for organizations with strict data handling requirements that still want the feature.
Agent Host Protocol underneath
Under the hood, VS Code’s agent infrastructure runs on the Agent Host Protocol. Copilot integration in 1.136 is powered by the official Copilot SDK rather than a custom implementation. That’s mostly invisible to users today, but it means other agent tools can integrate at the same protocol level going forward.
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