VS Code 1.136 Ships on 2 September 2026
Visual Studio Code 1.136 shipped on 2 September 2026, one month after version 1.135. The release organises its changes around a single theme: helping developers finish pull requests with AI agents and manage agent work across complex, multi-folder workspaces. The three headline capabilities are Agent Merge, multi-root workspace support for Copilot and Claude sessions, and a chat session hierarchy for organising related agent conversations. Each addresses a specific friction point that emerged as teams moved from single-file AI assistance to multi-step autonomous agent workflows that span entire repositories.
Agent Merge: Finishing Pull Requests With AI Agents
Agent Merge is the centrepiece of VS Code 1.136 and ships in preview. It extends what AI agents can do inside the editor beyond writing and reviewing code into the full pull request lifecycle: resolving open review feedback, addressing failed CI checks, and clearing merge conflicts. A developer working on a branch with outstanding review comments or a failing pipeline check can invoke Agent Merge to hand those tasks to an agent. The agent reads the review thread or CI failure log, proposes and applies changes, and marks the PR ready to merge once the blockers are resolved.
Scope and Limits of the Agent Merge Preview
In the current preview, Agent Merge requires the GitHub Pull Requests and Issues extension and works with repositories hosted on GitHub. Teams using GitLab, Bitbucket, or self-hosted Git providers can track pull request state inside VS Code but cannot route Agent Merge resolution tasks to those hosts in this release. The preview also keeps the developer in the loop on genuine conflict resolution: when both sides of a merge conflict modify the same logic, Agent Merge surfaces the conflict for manual decision rather than selecting silently.
Multi-Root Workspaces for Copilot and Claude
Developers working on monorepos or related multi-repository projects often open VS Code with two or more root folders in a single workspace — a pattern called a multi-root workspace. Prior to 1.136, Copilot and Claude agent sessions in VS Code operated on a single root folder at a time. Version 1.136 adds experimental multi-root workspace support, so agent sessions can read, write, and search across all folders in the workspace within a single context. A coding agent that needs to update a shared library and the service that consumes it can now do both in one session, without the developer switching workspace roots or manually supplying the other directory's context.
This is an experimental feature in 1.136 and must be enabled in VS Code settings before use.
Chat Sessions: Organising Agent Work
AI coding agents in VS Code generate conversation threads as they work — reasoning steps, tool calls, proposed edits, error messages. On active projects, those threads accumulate quickly and become difficult to navigate. The 1.136 chat sessions feature introduces a hierarchy: developers can organise related agent conversations into a named session, collapse or expand them together, and see at a glance which threads require attention. A visual indicator system distinguishes between threads that are complete, threads the agent is waiting on, and threads that have surfaced a decision point requiring developer input.
Other Changes in 1.136
Version 1.136 fixes a regression introduced by npm 12 that caused package.json hover metadata to show empty or incorrect package information. Teams running npm 12 or later will see correct registry data and description text on package hover after updating to 1.136. The release also includes improvements to terminal, editor, browser debugging, and accessibility experiences, alongside the agent and workspace additions that dominate this cycle's scope.
What This Means for Development Teams in India
The VS Code agent feature cadence in 2026 has shortened to monthly releases, each adding a distinct layer of autonomous capability. The 1.136 additions collectively reduce the overhead of managing agent work on production projects. For teams in India building products hosted on GitHub, Agent Merge is the most immediately actionable change: the ability to hand unblocked review feedback and CI failures to an agent, rather than manually triaging each one, shortens the gap between a code review pass and a merge-ready state on active pull requests.
For teams running monorepo architectures — a common pattern at Indian product companies building mobile apps alongside backend APIs alongside shared component libraries — the multi-root workspace support is the more significant structural change. Agents can now reason about the full project dependency graph rather than a single folder at a time, which makes cross-component refactors and integration tasks substantially more tractable as autonomous agent operations.
The session hierarchy feature is most useful for teams that have moved AI coding from experimental to routine: managing ten or twenty active agent threads across a project requires exactly the kind of organised view that 1.136 provides. For team leads and engineering managers tracking which agent threads are blocked and which are complete, the session hierarchy turns agent work into an auditable, navigable record rather than a flat list of conversations.
The Bottom Line
VS Code 1.136, released 2 September 2026, adds three headline capabilities. Agent Merge (preview) extends AI agents into the pull request lifecycle — resolving review feedback, failed CI checks, and merge conflicts — currently for GitHub-hosted repositories with the GitHub Pull Requests and Issues extension installed. Multi-root workspace support (experimental) lets Copilot and Claude agent sessions operate across all folders in a multi-root workspace in a single context. The chat sessions hierarchy organises related agent threads with visual attention indicators. Version 1.136 also fixes a package.json hover regression introduced in npm 12. The overall theme is reducing friction in managing AI agent work across multi-component projects at production scale.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Agent Merge in VS Code 1.136 and how does it work?+
Agent Merge is a preview feature in VS Code 1.136, released 2 September 2026, that extends AI agent capability into the pull request lifecycle. Rather than just writing code, an agent can now read open review feedback threads, address failing CI checks, and resolve merge conflicts on a pull request until it is ready to merge. The feature requires the GitHub Pull Requests and Issues extension and currently supports repositories hosted on GitHub. When a merge conflict involves logic changes on both sides, Agent Merge surfaces the conflict for manual developer decision rather than picking a side autonomously.
What is multi-root workspace support in VS Code 1.136?+
Multi-root workspace support is an experimental feature in VS Code 1.136 that allows Copilot and Claude agent sessions to read, write, and search across all root folders in a multi-root VS Code workspace within a single context. In prior versions, agent sessions were limited to a single root folder at a time. The update means a coding agent can update a shared library and the service that depends on it within one agent session, without the developer switching workspace roots or manually providing additional folder context. The feature must be enabled in VS Code settings and is marked experimental in the 1.136 release.
What are chat sessions in VS Code 1.136?+
Chat sessions is a feature in VS Code 1.136 that introduces a hierarchy for organising related AI agent conversation threads. Developers can group related agent conversations into a named session, collapse or expand them together, and use a visual indicator system to see at a glance which threads are complete, which the agent is waiting on, and which have surfaced a decision point requiring developer input. The feature addresses the growing challenge of managing many concurrent agent threads on active projects, turning a flat list of conversations into an organised, navigable record of agent work.
What bug fix did VS Code 1.136 include for npm 12 users?+
VS Code 1.136 fixes a regression introduced by npm version 12 that caused package.json hover metadata to display empty or incorrect information when a developer hovered over a package name in a package.json file. Teams running npm 12 or later experienced missing package descriptions and registry data on hover. The 1.136 release restores correct hover metadata for package names in package.json files regardless of which npm version is in use.
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