Visual Studio Code previews chat customizations editor

Just-released Version 1.113 of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code editor emphasizes improvements ranging from chat customizations to support for MCP (Model Context Protocol) in Copilot CLI and Claude agents.

Released March 25, VS Code can be downloaded for Windows, Linux, or Mac via the VS Code download webpage. VS Code 1.113 closely follows VS Code Versions 1.111 and 1.112 as part of Microsoft’s new plan to issue releases on a weekly schedule instead of monthly.

The chat customizations editor previewed in VS Code 1.113 has a centralized UI for creating and managing all chat customizations in one place. The editor organizes customization types into separate tabs, such as prompt files, custom instructions, custom agents, and agent skills. It also provides an embedded code editor with syntax highlighting and validation. Developers can create customizations from scratch or use AI to generate initial content based on a project, according to Microsoft.

Elsewhere in Version 1.113, MCP servers registered in VS Code are bridged to Copilot CLI and Claude agents. This applies to user-defined servers and servers defined in a workspace via mcp.json files. Previously, MCP servers configured in VS Code only were available to local agents running in the editor.  For Claude session listing, VS Code now adopts the official API from the Claude agent SDK to list out sessions and their messages. Previously, Microsoft relied on parsing Claude JSON files on disk, which had a risk of being out of sync if Claude changed their structure. Issues with the Claude agent not showing all sessions or messages should now be resolved.

Also in VS Code 1.113:

• Subagents now can invoke other subagents, enabling more complex multistep workflows. Previously, subagents were restricted from calling other subagents to prevent infinite recursion.





• When working with images in chat, whether this involves attached screenshots to a request or the agent-generated images via tool calls, developers can now select any image attachment to open it in a full image viewer experience.





• Models that support reasoning, such as Claude Sonnet 4.6 and GPT-5.4, now show a Thinking Effort submenu directly in the model picker. This can control how much reasoning the model applies to each request without navigating to VS Code settings.





• Browser tab management has been improved.





• VS Code now ships with new default themes: VS Code Light and VS Code Dark. These themes are designed to provide a modern, fresh look while maintaining the familiarity and usability of the previous default “Modern” themes.