News

VS Code 1.111 Debuts Weekly Stable Cadence, Expands Agent Controls

• By David Ramel
• 03/11/2026

The March 9 release concentrates heavily on agent behavior in Copilot-powered chat, giving developers more ways to control how much autonomy an agent has, how custom agents can be extended, and how agent activity can be inspected when something goes wrong.

Beyond those AI features, the release also includes chat tip changes, an experimental terminal grouping option for AI CLI profiles, and a smaller update for extension authors working with localized strings.

The shift to weekly Stable builds is one of the most notable changes in the package. Microsoft said the cadence change was made "to improve our engineering processes to ship high-quality features at a faster pace." The nightly Insiders builds for the latest cutting-edge feature evaluations will continue.

For product functionality, however, the main additions are a permissions model for chat agents, an Autopilot mode in preview, agent-scoped hooks in preview, and a new way to attach agent debug event snapshots to chat for troubleshooting. Microsoft documented the full set of changes in the VS Code 1.111 release notes.

Agent Permissions and Autopilot
The new permissions picker in the Chat view lets users choose how much autonomy an agent gets during a session. According to Microsoft, the picker supports three levels: Default Approvals, Bypass Approvals and Autopilot (Preview). In the product documentation for using tools with agents, Microsoft says the permissions picker "controls how much autonomy the agent has during a session."

In 1.111, Default Approvals preserves existing confirmation behavior for tools that require approval. Bypass Approvals automatically approves tool calls and retries on errors. Autopilot goes further, automatically approving tool calls, retrying on errors, auto-responding to questions and continuing until the task is complete. The release notes describe it as a way to "let your agents iterate autonomously until they complete their task."

Microsoft also attached a clear caution to the feature. In the documentation, the company notes that Bypass Approvals and Autopilot bypass manual approval prompts, including for potentially destructive actions such as file edits, terminal commands and external tool calls. The first time a user enables one of those levels, VS Code shows a warning dialog. Microsoft states in the docs that "Autopilot is currently in preview."

Custom Agents Get Scoped Hooks
Another preview feature in 1.111 is agent-scoped hooks, aimed at developers building or customizing agents. Microsoft said in the release notes that custom agent frontmatter now supports hooks that run only when a specific agent is selected or invoked through runSubagent. The company linked the feature to its agent hooks documentation, where it states that "Agent-scoped hooks are currently in preview."

According to that documentation, agent-scoped hooks can be defined directly in a custom agent's YAML frontmatter. They run only when the associated custom agent is active and can be used alongside workspace-level or user-level hooks configured for the same event. Microsoft said that model lets developers attach pre- and post-processing logic to a specific agent without changing behavior for other chat interactions.

The release notes also specify how to turn the feature on. To try it, users need to enable the chat.useCustomAgentHooks setting. From there, they can add a hooks field to the YAML frontmatter in a .agent.md file and map event names to hook command objects.

New Debugging Path for Agent Behavior
VS Code 1.111 also adds what Microsoft calls a debug events snapshot workflow for troubleshooting agent behavior. In the release notes, the company said users can now attach a snapshot of agent debug events as chat context with #debugEventsSnapshot and use it to ask about loaded customizations, token consumption or other session behavior.

That feature aligns with Microsoft's Debug chat interactions documentation, which says developers can "attach a snapshot of the agent debug events to a chat conversation and ask the AI questions about the current session." The same document says that is useful for understanding token usage, which customizations loaded, what tool calls happened and how long requests took.

The related docs also outline the broader debugging surface now available in VS Code. Microsoft describes two complementary tools: the Agent Debug panel, which shows a chronological event log of a chat session, and the Chat Debug view, which exposes raw request and response details, including system prompt, user prompt, context and tool response payloads. For teams building custom agents or working through unexpected tool behavior, that adds a more explicit troubleshooting path than the product previously exposed.

Other Changes in 1.111
Outside the headline AI features, Microsoft said it redesigned chat tips to create a more structured onboarding path. Foundational tips are shown first, followed by quality-of-life tips after users complete or dismiss the first set. The release notes also say tips are hidden when multiple chat editors are open, and new tips were added for the /init and /fork slash commands.

The release includes an experimental terminal setting, terminal.integrated.experimental.aiProfileGrouping, that places AI CLI terminal profiles such as GitHub Copilot CLI in a dedicated group at the top of the terminal profile dropdown.

For extension developers, Microsoft added basic IntelliSense support for localized strings in extension package.json files. The company said the update adds Go to Definition and Find All References support for localized strings backed by package.nls.json. The release notes point to Microsoft's vscode-l10n repository, which describes package.nls.json as the file used for translating static contributions in an extension's package.json.

On deprecations, Microsoft said there are no new deprecations in 1.111. It did reiterate that Edit Mode was officially deprecated in 1.110, can be temporarily re-enabled through chat.editMode.hidden, and will be fully removed beginning with version 1.125.

In sum, VS Code 1.111 is both a feature release and a release-process marker. Microsoft used it to introduce weekly Stable servicing while adding more controls around agent autonomy, more targeted customization hooks and more visibility into AI session behavior.