By ByteBot
VS Code 1.137 landed September 9, and most of the coverage will focus on Voice Mode because it has the most photogenic demo. That’s the wrong thing to focus on. The more significant feature is Automations — the first time VS Code agents can run without you starting them. Microsoft is quietly turning the editor into an agent scheduler, and this release is where that shift becomes usable.
Automations: The One to Enable Immediately
Automations (Preview) lets you schedule recurring agent tasks to run hourly, daily, or weekly — or fire them on demand. The feature ships with built-in templates: catch up on recent changes, triage GitHub issues, or find bugs in the current codebase. You can also define your own prompt and schedule.
To try it, set chat.automations.enabled to true in Settings, then open the Agents window and select Automations in the sidebar. The feature is off by default in Stable and on by default in Insiders, with a gradual rollout in progress.
{
"chat.automations.enabled": true
}Once enabled, create a daily automation with a prompt like “Summarize commits from the last 24 hours and flag anything that might break CI.” Run it on demand a few times first to calibrate the output, then put it on a schedule. The actual value isn’t the templates — it’s realizing that any repetitive, text-oriented task you currently do manually is now a candidate for scheduling. Bug triaging, dependency scanning, PR summaries: these don’t need your active involvement to kick off.
This is in Preview, which means output quality will vary and the feature will evolve. File feedback. The window where your input can shape how this works is narrow.
Voice Mode: Useful, With Expectations
Voice Mode (Experimental) lets you talk to an agent while it works on your code and interrupt it mid-task. The use case that actually matters: you’re watching an agent make changes, and you want to redirect it without stopping the session to type. “Actually, don’t rename the function — create an alias instead.” Voice Mode handles that.
Setup requires a microphone. Speech recognition runs on-device after an initial model download, so no internet connection is needed for subsequent sessions. To configure:
{
"agents.voice.showTranscript": true,
"agents.voice.voice": "nova"
}Right-click the Voice Mode button in the Agents window to access configuration, microphone selection, and the introduction walkthrough. The Command Palette has Voice Mode: Show Introduction if you want to revisit onboarding.
The honest take: this is early. You’ll encounter recognition errors and awkward handoffs. But as an alternative to typing mid-agent-run corrections, it works. If you’ve been waiting for a reason to keep a microphone plugged into your dev machine, this is a reasonable one.
Agent Sessions That Actually Persist
VS Code 1.136 shipped the Agent Host Protocol (AHP) — an open spec that decouples agent sessions from the VS Code extension host. 1.137 is where it becomes practically useful.
Sessions now survive folder closures. Close a folder while an agent is working and the session continues in the background Agent Host process. Reopen VS Code and pick up exactly where you left off. For remote work, the Agent Host can run as a standalone process on a remote machine and expose AHP over WebSocket — VS Code connects over SSH or a dev tunnel. You can run a long agent task on a beefy server, then check on it from your laptop.
The AHP spec is open, which means other editors can implement it. This is infrastructure-level work — and 1.137 is the version where developers can actually put it to use.
GitHub Integration: The Quiet Win
You can now review GitHub issue and pull request details directly in the Agents window, without the repository being open. This requires the GitHub Pull Requests extension. It removes the tab-switch cycle that interrupts most bug-fixing sessions: find issue in browser, open VS Code, start working, switch back to check issue details again.
It’s a small change that makes a measurable difference over a full workday.
What to Do Now
Enable Automations first. Set chat.automations.enabled: true, create one daily automation using a built-in template, and run it manually a few times before putting it on a schedule. Then try Voice Mode once — even if you never use it again, understanding what it can and can’t do is useful context when the feature matures.
1.137 has no deprecated settings, so upgrading is clean. The official release notes cover the full feature list and bug fixes. The Automations documentation has template examples and configuration details worth bookmarking.
The shift underway is real: agents are moving from something you invoke to something that runs alongside your work. 1.137 is an early step in that direction, and Preview features are exactly when developer input matters most.
