VS Code adds a dedicated agent app

The Agents app preview has landed in VS Code Insiders, and it's being compared to Cursor 3's agent window, OpenAI Codex, and the Claude Code desktop app.

Early user experiences are mixed. Some users hit screen glitches and input box resets as soon as they sent a chat message, causing it to fail to start at all, while others reported it working normally a few days later. Behavior varied depending on local folder, GitHub repository, and whether the Copilot CLI was installed, and permission issues and account settings impact were also mentioned.

On the feature side, quite a lot has been confirmed.

• Diff viewing: Clicking a file in the Changes panel opens VS Code's default diff editor in a modal
• Files/terminal: File tree and terminal are available
• Browser: Opens in a modal window form
• Entrypoints: Accessible via the command palette, macOS app search, and Windows Start menu

However, the limitations are also clear. There were reports of no WSL support, and some users reported that file creation/deletion permissions weren't working properly. Also, currently you can't select reasoning effort, and many reacted that the modal-centric diff hurts navigability.

According to the dev team's response, they're considering connecting to other machines, better discoverability, and adding inline stacked diff going forward. The community is especially strongly requesting remote SSH, devcontainer support, and a mobile app that connects to a local machine.