VS Code 1.137 Adds Scheduled Agent Automations

Visual Studio Code 1.137, released Sept. 9, adds a Preview feature called Automations that runs a Copilot agent task on a schedule instead of waiting for a developer to start it, according to Microsoft's own release notes.

Automations runs the task before you open the laptop

Turned on with the chat.automations.enabled setting, Automations lets a developer pick a template built for catching up on changes, triaging issues or finding bugs, or write a custom prompt, then set it to run hourly, daily, weekly or on demand from the Agents window sidebar. Microsoft's release notes describe the feature as rolling out gradually to all users but do not say what share of users have access as of this release, or whether a run counts against the same usage limits as a chat session started by hand.

Voice Mode lets you interrupt an agent mid-sentence

A second, Experimental feature, Voice Mode, adds spoken conversation with an agent through three settings: agents.voice.enabled, agents.voice.showTranscript and agents.voice.voice. A developer can push to talk, interrupt or redirect an agent while it is still responding, and the interface tracks the active session, selected model and attached files as it listens. Organization administrators can turn the feature off by disabling Copilot preview features for their org, per the release notes.

NT Compatible writer Philipp Esselbach, who covered the release the same day, said Voice Mode carries "background overhead" that offsets its time savings on long refactoring sessions, and that both headline features target "power users already running agents regularly" rather than people opening VS Code for the first time.

Feature	Status	Setting
Automations	Preview	chat.automations.enabled
Voice Mode	Experimental	agents.voice.enabled
GitHub issue and PR viewing in Agents window	Experimental	not specified

The feature neither outlet led with

Esselbach argued the real story in 1.137 is smaller and less demo-friendly: the Agent Host Protocol, which lets multiple VS Code windows connect to the same running agent session instead of each window starting its own. He said that architecture change, decoupling an agent session from any single workspace, is what makes "autonomous agents actually practical instead of just performative," a claim Microsoft's own release notes support with a feature description but do not quantify with any measurement of session continuity or dropped-session rates.

The release also adds a unified diff-editor layout shared between single-file and multi-file review, and live status updates on GitHub issue and pull-request links pasted into Markdown, both listed as Experimental. None of the three Experimental features has a graduation date to General Availability in the release notes. Set against GitHub's own disclosure of Copilot's inference-cost cuts earlier in the week, the pattern in Microsoft's developer tools this week is the same one twice: ship the agent feature first, in preview, and publish the cost and reliability numbers separately, later, or not at all. Understanding what Automations and Voice Mode actually are requires the vocabulary GitHub has been formalizing for its own agent products, catalogued in The Terminal's look at GitHub's AI coding glossary.