Visual Studio Code 1.99 makes Next Edit Suggestions generally available

The March update for Visual Studio Code has been released with the version number 1.99. In particular, Microsoft has worked on existing AI features of the source code editor. There are also updates for Linux and macOS users: Support for Linux legacy servers ends with this release, while device management is now also possible on macOS in addition to Windows.

Updates for Agent Mode and Next Edit Suggestions

In February 2025, Microsoft introduced Agent Mode in GitHub Copilot as a preview feature. This feature enables the AI assistant to independently review code and identify and fix errors. The functions also include suggesting terminal commands and analyzing runtime errors.

With version 1.99, Agent Mode is not only available in the Insiders program, but also in the stable VS Code release. This currently still requires the chat.agent.enabled setting. However, this will no longer be necessary within the next few weeks, as Microsoft plans to enable the feature for all users by default. To increase accessibility, Agent Mode has been given a new help dialog that provides further explanations of the function and its navigation.

Another AI feature is now generally available: Next Edit Suggestions (NES). This GitHub copilot function was also introduced as a preview in February and is used to provide developers with dynamic suggestions for future code changes. The suggestions should now also be more compact and clearer.

Further changes have been made to the Copilot chat. Both Copilot Pro and Copilot Free users can now use their own API keys as a preview feature to integrate additional language models – for example Azure, Anthropic, Gemini or OpenAI models. This should allow developers to use new models that Copilot cannot handle natively in a timely manner.

In addition, Copilot functions including Agent Mode can now be used to create and edit Jupyter Notebooks in the stable VS Code release. Since last month, curious users have been able to try this out in the Insiders version of the Editor, which allows an early look at new functions.

Experimental innovation for Python extension

In addition to the AI functions, the development team has also dedicated itself to the official Python extension for VS Code. This includes an experimental change to Pylance –, the standard language server in the Python extension –, to provide increased accuracy and responsiveness in diagnostics. This can be activated using python.analysis.usePullDiagnostics.

The new version of Visual Studio Code is available for download from Microsoft. Further information on the March release can be found in the announcement article.

(mai)