Visual Studio Code 1.145 Update New Features Explained: Remote Agents, Cron Automations and Chat Controls

Illustrative image: the Visual Studio Code welcome screen. This is an older VS Code screenshot, not the 1.145 interface — it shows the editor whose November update this post explains. Image: Wikimedia Commons / Microsoft (screenshot under free licence).

TL;DR — Visual Studio Code 1.145 update new features explained in one line: Microsoft shipped VS Code 1.145 to the Stable channel on 4 November 2026, making remote agent sessions feel local, adding cron schedules for local automations, and giving you control over how much chat noise you see.

📌 KEY HIGHLIGHTS

• The release: Visual Studio Code 1.145.0 reached the Stable channel on 4 November 2026 — a free update for Windows, macOS and Linux.
• Remote agents feel local: preview apps and use interactive canvases from remote agent sessions without leaving the Agents window (Preview, behind settings).
• Cron automations: local automations can now run on five-field cron schedules instead of only the built-in presets — cron does not apply to cloud automations.
• Chat verbosity control: three view modes — Conversation, Verbose and Compact (default) — change how much reasoning and tool-call detail you see.
• Mixed harnesses: nested sessions can now use a different AI harness from their parent, so one session can hold a Copilot plan and a Claude review of it.

Visual Studio Code 1.145 update new features explained: what actually changed

VS Code 1.145 is an agent-era update, not a cosmetic one. Since late 2025, Microsoft has been moving the editor away from a single chat box and toward a persistent "agent host" — a separate process that keeps AI coding sessions running across windows, folders and machines. Version 1.145 pushes that idea further: the headline features are all about sessions that survive, schedules that run themselves, and chats you can actually read.

It is a Stable release, which matters. Features in the Stable channel are the ones every user gets through the normal update, unlike Insiders builds where features arrive early and unfinished. If VS Code is already installed, the update arrives via Check for Updates; new users download it from Microsoft's VS Code site for Windows (x64 and Arm64), macOS (Universal, Intel and Apple silicon) or Linux (.deb, .rpm, .tar.gz and Snap).

Remote agents: preview apps and canvases without leaving the Agents window

The most practical change is for developers whose agents run somewhere else — on a remote machine, a dev server or a cloud session. Two Preview features, both behind experimental settings, close the gap between remote and local work.

First, browsing over remote agent host connections: when an agent session runs on a remote agent host, the integrated browser in the Agents window now loads pages through that host, just as it already does in remote workspaces. If the agent starts a dev server on the remote machine, you can open it right in the Agents window, preview the app, validate the agent's changes and give feedback — the same loop you would use locally. Enable it with the workbench.browser.enableRemoteProxy setting.

Second, remote canvases: with the same setting plus chat.canvases.enabled, interactive canvases hosted on a remote agent host now work inside VS Code too. Both features are explicitly Preview, and Microsoft asks testers to file issues in the VS Code repository — treat them as early, not finished.

Illustrative image: code on a screen. VS Code 1.145's headline features are about how AI agent sessions run and are scheduled, so a code screen is the closest honest visual. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Automations, verbosity and mixed harnesses: the agent controls

Automations — scheduled agent tasks that run from a saved prompt without you starting each session by hand — gain the release's most immediately useful upgrade. Local automations can now use a Cron schedule: a five-field cron expression for cadences the built-in presets cannot describe, with a dialog that validates the expression and describes the resulting schedule. Microsoft's docs give the example of running at 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM Monday to Friday. Two limits matter: cron schedules are for local automations only, not cloud automations, and local automations can now also use a custom agent from the selected workspace. Disabled automations move into a collapsed section so they stop obscuring active work.

Chat verbosity is the quality-of-life fix for long agent sessions. The chat.persistentProgressVerbosity setting offers three view modes from the Chat view's More Actions menu: Conversation groups reasoning and tool calls into collapsed sections between blocks of response text; Verbose shows each step with tool calls expanded and no internal scrolling limit; Compact (the default) previews tool calls while they run, then collapses finished groups into summary rows. Switching modes needs no new chat, and the modes change only how the conversation is displayed — not its context or the work the agent performs.

Nested sessions get more flexible too: previously every nested session inherited its parent's harness, so getting a second opinion meant starting a separate session and losing the grouping. Now, behind chat.agentHost.multipleChatProviders.enabled, a nested session can use a different harness — ask Claude to review a plan Copilot wrote, or give Codex the same task side by side in the same session. Each chat keeps its own model, agent and permission levels.

Feature	Status	What it does
Remote browser + canvases	Preview	Preview remote apps and use canvases from remote agent sessions in the Agents window
Cron automations	Stable (local only)	Five-field cron schedules for local agent automations; not available for cloud automations
Chat verbosity modes	Experimental	Conversation, Verbose or Compact display for agent reasoning and tool calls
Mixed harnesses	Preview	Nested sessions can use a different AI harness from their parent session
File exclusions (! prefix)	Stable	Keep chosen files visible and searchable inside an excluded folder
Blobby game	Stable (fun)	A platform-jumping break game starring Blobby, the VS Code pet

Why it matters for World Tech readers

No India-specific announcement is attached to this release, and this post does not invent one. The relevance is read-across: VS Code is the default editor for a huge share of the world's developers, including India's students, freelancers and startup teams, and it is free. When the world's most-used editor changes how agent sessions work, that change lands in Indian classrooms, hackathons and codebases within days, not months.

The practical read is about who benefits first. Remote-agent previews help developers whose code runs on a machine that is not the one in front of them — a common setup for students on low-cost laptops and teams with shared servers. Cron automations help anyone with recurring chores: nightly issue triage, a morning summary of repository changes, a weekly bug hunt. And verbosity controls are for everyone who has watched an agent's reasoning scroll past faster than they could read it. The same week's developer-tooling news shows the direction of travel — see our Xcode 27.3 beta explainer and our Rails 8.1.4.1 security update explainer — but VS Code 1.145 is the one most developers will actually install this week.

Should you care?

✅ Yes — update when it reaches you, and try cron automations first. They are the one 1.145 feature that is Stable, local and immediately useful without a Copilot plan. ⏳ Treat the remote-agent features as a preview: enable them to test, not to depend on, and remember cloud automations need a Copilot plan and a GitHub account.

Price, availability & alternatives

Visual Studio Code is free and open source. Version 1.145.0 is available now from Microsoft's VS Code download pages and via Check for Updates inside the editor. There is no paid tier for the editor itself; the Copilot-powered parts — including cloud automations, which run on GitHub infrastructure even when your computer is off — require a Copilot plan (Pro, Pro+, Max, Business or Enterprise, per GitHub's October changelog). Alternatives such as JetBrains IDEs, Zed and the open-source VSCodium build exist, but none of them carries VS Code's agent-host features, which are the point of this release.

FAQs

What's new in Visual Studio Code 1.145?
VS Code 1.145, released to Stable on 4 November 2026, adds remote-agent previews and canvases, cron schedules for local automations, chat verbosity modes, mixed AI harnesses in nested sessions, file-exclusion exceptions and a Blobby break game.

How do I update Visual Studio Code to 1.145?
If VS Code is already installed, use Check for Updates in the editor; on Mac and Windows the auto-update channel delivers it automatically. Linux users download the new package (.deb, .rpm, .tar.gz or Snap) from Microsoft's VS Code site, since auto-updates are not supported there.

What is a cron automation in VS Code 1.145?
It is a local agent automation that runs on a custom schedule written as a five-field cron expression, for cadences the built-in presets cannot describe. The schedule dialog validates the expression and describes when it will run — but cron schedules do not work for cloud automations.

Are VS Code 1.145's remote agent features available to everyone?
The remote browser and remote canvas features are Preview, behind the workbench.browser.enableRemoteProxy and chat.canvases.enabled settings, so anyone can try them but they may change. Cloud automations are separate: they need a GitHub account with write access to an eligible repository and a Copilot plan that allows automations.

TAKEAWAY: VS Code 1.145 is the editor catching up with its own agents — sessions that survive, schedules that run themselves, and chats you can read. Update, set one cron automation, and leave the preview features for testing.

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Sources

• Microsoft Visual Studio Code — "Visual Studio Code 1.145" release notes (4 November 2026, primary source): code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_145
• Microsoft Visual Studio Code docs — "Create and manage agent automations": code.visualstudio.com/docs/agents/run/automations
• NT Compatible — "Visual Studio Code 1.145 Stable Release: Remote Agents, Cron Automations and More" (4 November 2026): ntcompatible.com
• GitHub Changelog — "Create and manage Copilot Automations in Visual Studio Code" (28 October 2026): github.blog