{"slug": "vs-code-1-131-see-your-subagents-speak-your-code", "title": "VS Code 1.131: See Your Subagents, Speak Your Code", "summary": "Microsoft's VS Code 1.131, released on July 29, introduces subagent visibility in the Agents window, built-in offline dictation powered by Microsoft's Nemotron model, and Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) support for the Agents window, enabling enterprise teams to use models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter, Azure, Ollama, and Foundry Local without routing through GitHub's infrastructure. The update also adds aggregate AI credit usage visibility for Copilot Business and Enterprise users in the Copilot status menu.", "body_md": "VS Code 1.131 landed on July 29 and, at first glance, looks like a routine monthly release. It isn’t. Beneath the familiar changelog format is a release organized around a single idea: you need to know what your AI agents are actually doing. After months of building out agent infrastructure, Microsoft is now giving developers the instruments to watch it run.\n\n## You Can Finally See Your Subagents\n\nThe biggest change in 1.131 is something that should have existed the moment VS Code launched multi-agent support: subagent visibility. When you run an orchestrated task in the Agents window — say, one subagent writing tests while another searches documentation — the parent conversation now shows each running subagent’s model, elapsed time, and the tool call it is currently executing. All of this without opening a separate thread.\n\nThis matters because multi-step agent pipelines are notoriously opaque. Until now, if a subagent stalled, you had no signal unless you manually clicked into its conversation to check. That is not a workflow — that is babysitting. The new overlay gives you live triage: a subagent sitting on a web search tool call for four minutes is a problem you can now see and address rather than discover after the whole pipeline times out.\n\nClick a running subagent’s entry and it opens in a side panel without displacing your current context. Simple, but it is the kind of detail that distinguishes a product people actually want to use from one they tolerate.\n\n## Voice Is Now Built In, and It Stays on Your Machine\n\nVS Code 1.131 ships built-in dictation — no Speech extension required. It works across chat inputs, text editors, and the integrated terminal, running through Microsoft’s offline Nemotron model. The important word there is offline: audio never leaves the device. There is no cloud processing happening in the background.\n\nThis is not a minor footnote. Enterprise developers using VS Code in air-gapped or compliance-sensitive environments have had limited voice options. Offline processing closes that gap cleanly. Enable it with `dictation.enabled`\n\nin your settings — organizations can manage this policy-wide.\n\nThere is also an optional LLM cleanup setting (`dictation.experimental.llmCleanup`\n\n) that sends your transcript text — not audio — to Copilot to strip filler words and add formatting. The distinction matters: the model that handles your voice stays local, while the cleanup step is an optional, text-only cloud call you can leave disabled.\n\nPlatform support covers Windows (x64 and Arm64), macOS Apple Silicon, and Linux x64/Arm64 with glibc 2.34 or later. Intel Macs, 32-bit systems, and the Web version are not yet supported.\n\n## BYOK in the Agents Window — Finally\n\nBYOK (Bring Your Own Key) has been available in VS Code Chat since early 2026. It was not available in the Agents window until now. That was a meaningful gap, because the Agents window is where the longer-running, more autonomous work happens. Teams with specific model preferences — or with compliance requirements that prevent them from using GitHub-managed models — were effectively locked out of VS Code’s most capable AI surface.\n\nAs of 1.131, BYOK models work in the Agents window. That includes Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter, Azure, Ollama, and Foundry Local for air-gapped setups. Enterprise teams running isolated environments can now access the full agent workflow without routing through GitHub’s model infrastructure. The full setup guide is on the [VS Code BYOK blog](https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2026/06/18/byok-vscode).\n\n## Two More Changes Worth Noting\n\nCopilot Business and Enterprise users can now see their aggregate AI credit usage for the current billing cycle directly in the Copilot status menu. Previously this required configuring a user-level budget — meaning most org-managed users had zero visibility into consumption. Treating basic usage transparency as an opt-in feature was an oversight; this corrects it.\n\nAgent sessions can now run in a Git worktree, giving each session an isolated copy of your branch. If you are running Copilot and Claude in parallel on the same codebase, they no longer share a working tree and cannot accidentally conflict. VS Code handles worktree creation automatically.\n\n## The Bigger Picture\n\nVS Code 1.129, 1.130, and 1.131 dropped on consecutive Tuesdays in July 2026. That cadence is not accidental. Microsoft introduced the [Agent Host Protocol](https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/agents/concepts/agent-host) in 1.129 — a dedicated process that runs agent sessions independently of editor windows — and has been methodically shipping the features that make it useful ever since.\n\nThe agent cockpit is being built in plain sight. Subagent observability, isolated worktrees per session, offline voice input, credit transparency: none of these is glamorous. Together, they are what turns an experimental AI feature into something a team can rely on in production. The full [VS Code 1.131 release notes](https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_131) are available now, along with the [GitHub Copilot July 2026 changelog](https://github.blog/changelog/2026-07-30-github-copilot-in-visual-studio-code-july-2026-releases/) covering the Agents window improvements in detail.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/vs-code-1-131-see-your-subagents-speak-your-code", "canonical_source": "https://byteiota.com/vs-code-1-131-see-your-subagents-speak-your-code/", "published_at": "2026-08-02 11:12:34+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-02 11:24:23.008734+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "ai-agents", "ai-products", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Microsoft", "VS Code", "GitHub", "Anthropic", "OpenAI", "Gemini", "OpenRouter", "Azure"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/vs-code-1-131-see-your-subagents-speak-your-code", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/vs-code-1-131-see-your-subagents-speak-your-code.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/vs-code-1-131-see-your-subagents-speak-your-code.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/vs-code-1-131-see-your-subagents-speak-your-code.jsonld"}}