VS Code 1.136 Adds Agent Merge and Locks Down Dictation DataVS Code 1.136 Adds Agent Merge and Locks Down Dictation DataVS Code 1.136 Adds Agent Merge and Locks Down Dictation DataVS Code 1.136 Adds Agent Merge and Locks Down Dictation Data
September 8, 2026
Visual Studio Code 1.136, released September 2, 2026, adds a preview feature called Agent Merge that assigns an AI agent to carry a pull request (a proposed code change submitted for review before it is merged into the main codebase) through review feedback, failed checks, and
Visual Studio Code 1.136, released September 2, 2026, adds a preview feature called Agent Merge that assigns an AI agent to carry a pull request (a proposed code change submitted for review before it is merged into the main codebase) through review feedback, failed checks, and merge conflicts until it is ready to ship. The more consequential change in the release is not that automation, it is what ships alongside it: new enterprise policy controls that let administrators lock dictation data out of cloud transcription and Copilot models entirely.
For IT and security leaders deciding whether to let an agent touch the merge button, that pairing, expanded agent authority bundled with new admin-level guardrails in the same release, is the real evaluation to make before switching Agent Merge on for an entire organization. Microsoft did not frame it that way in its own release notes. The two features simply landed together.
What's new
VS Code 1.136 was published by Microsoft on September 2, 2026. The headline addition is Agent Merge (a preview feature that takes over the last stretch of getting a pull request merged), which asks an agent to address reviewer comments, fix failed checks, resolve merge conflicts, and rerun workflows until the PR is mergeable. It is off by default: users enable it through the setting chat.agentMerge.enabled, then turn it on per session either from "Enable Agent Merge for Active Session" in the Agents window or via the Agent Merge button in the title bar.
The release also ships multi-root workspaces (an experimental feature letting GitHub Copilot and Claude agents operate across multiple project folders inside a single editor window's chat view), a departure from the single-folder assumption most AI coding assistants still make. Agent hooks, the automated triggers agents run against, stay scoped to one workspace folder each; if VS Code detects hooks in more than one folder, it prompts the developer to pick which folder's hooks load as primary. A second experimental feature, chat backgrounds, lets users personalize the Agents window with a theme-aware pattern built from VS Code's own icon set or a supplied image. Rounding out the release, new enterprise policy controls give admins authority over the dictation model and language-model transcript cleanup.
VS Code itself was first announced by Microsoft at the 2015 Build conference, and the underlying Code - OSS project went up on GitHub under the MIT license that November before the editor graduated out of preview in April 2016. A decade later, it is one of the most widely used editors in professional software development, which is the install base Agent Merge and multi-root workspaces are now shipping into.
Why it matters
Most AI coding tools stop at generating a diff (a file showing exactly which lines of code changed). Agent Merge is aimed at the friction after that: reviewer comments, a failing CI (continuous integration, the automated system that builds and tests code before it ships) check, a merge conflict (the state where Git, the version control system Linus Torvalds began building in 2005 and that has since become the standard tool for tracking code changes across the software industry, cannot automatically reconcile two competing edits to the same lines of code). That is where pull requests stall in practice, and it is a different, narrower claim than "the agent writes better code." Agent Merge is explicitly a preview, which signals Microsoft is not yet confident enough in unattended conflict resolution to make it default behavior.
Multi-root workspace support matters for a similar structural reason: real engineering teams work across monorepos (single repositories that hold many related projects) and multi-folder projects, not single-folder demos, so extending GitHub Copilot and Claude agent access across folders in one chat view is a closer match to how PRs actually get built and reviewed. A team split across a frontend folder, a backend folder, and a shared-libraries folder no longer has to bounce an agent between separate editor windows to get a single change reviewed end to end.
The enterprise dictation controls address a narrower but sharper concern. Letting admins require on-device transcription and disable language-model transcript cleanup means dictation audio can be kept from ever reaching a cloud transcription service or a Copilot model, while still leaving dictation itself available to developers. That is a data-residency decision, the kind of control that regulated organizations operating under frameworks like the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, in force since 2018, are increasingly expected to demonstrate rather than merely claim. Independent analyst commentary specifically on this announcement was not publicly available at publication time.
Competitive Landscape
The VS Code 1.136 release notes draw no direct competitor comparison, and Microsoft's own framing stays focused on what shipped rather than how it stacks up against other editors. No rival tool is named in the source material alongside Agent Merge or multi-root workspaces, and no independent benchmark comparing VS Code's new agent-driven merge capability to a similar feature in a competing editor was publicly available at publication time.
That absence of a named comparison is itself worth noting. Most AI coding assistants on the market today stop at code generation and review suggestions; extending an agent's authority into the merge step itself, past reviewer feedback, failed checks, and conflict resolution, is a narrower and more specific claim than a general "AI pair programmer" pitch. Whether other editors follow with an equivalent agent-merge capability, and how quickly, is the detail worth tracking as this feature moves out of preview, not a comparison Microsoft or any rival has drawn yet.
What's next
Both Agent Merge and multi-root workspaces ship as preview and experimental features respectively, and Microsoft has not published a general-availability timeline for either in this release. That is consistent with a feature still gathering feedback rather than one ready for default-on rollout: Agent Merge requires an explicit setting plus a per-session toggle, a two-step gate that suggests Microsoft wants deliberate opt-in, not silent adoption.
The primary-folder picker for agent hooks in multi-root workspaces points to an unresolved edge case, teams with hooks defined in several folders still need a manual disambiguation step, which is the kind of rough edge that typically gets refined across several point releases before a feature exits experimental status. The enterprise dictation and transcript-cleanup policies, by contrast, read as a first installment rather than a finished admin toolkit; Microsoft did not detail how the policies are deployed at the fleet level, leaving open how IT teams roll them out beyond individual settings.
The next point release is the one worth watching for both: whether Agent Merge picks up broader conflict-resolution coverage, and whether the primary-folder picker for hooks gets automated away instead of staying a manual step, will say more about how close either feature is to general availability than this release's notes do on their own.
Agent Merge automates the part of the pull request process where humans hand off control. The dictation controls in the same release do the opposite: they exist so an admin can take control back. Whether that balance holds once Agent Merge leaves preview is the question worth watching, not the feature announcement itself.
For a CISO (chief information security officer) evaluating whether to greenlight AI-assisted PR merges org-wide, VS Code 1.136 hands over two separate switches to reason about. chat.agentMerge.enabled gives agents write access to the merge path, while the new dictation policy controls let an admin block voice data from ever reaching a cloud transcription service or a Copilot model, full stop. That second switch is the audit-readiness lever, not the productivity one, and it is the one procurement should sign off on before the first.
-- Aria Lin, Enterprise Technology Analyst
Sources: VS Code · Visual Studio Code (Wikipedia)