# VS Code 1.136: Agent Merge Ships With Open Agent Protocol > Source: > Published: 2026-09-03 20:07:47+00:00 VS Code 1.136 dropped on September 2, 2026, and the headline feature is **Agent Merge** — an agent that takes a pull request across the finish line without you babysitting it. It reads review feedback, fixes failed checks, resolves merge conflicts, reruns CI workflows, and repeats the loop until the PR is clean and mergeable. Then it merges it, or drops it into your merge queue. That is a complete developer workflow handed off to an agent, not a suggestion or an autocomplete. If you have been waiting for AI tooling that actually closes a loop rather than opening new ones, this is it. ## How to Enable Agent Merge Agent Merge is in preview, so you have to opt in. Add this to your VS Code settings: ``` "chat.agentMerge.enabled": true ``` Once enabled, open the command palette and run **Enable Agent Merge for Active Session**, or click the Agent Merge button that appears in the Agents window title bar. Point it at an open PR, let it run. The agent handles the loop — review comment by comment, check by check — until your CI is green and the merge goes through. ## The Bigger Story: Agent Host Protocol Goes Open Agent Merge is the shiny feature, but the more important development in 1.136 is the **Agent Host Protocol (AHP) shipping as an open standard**. AHP is the protocol that sits between VS Code’s agent runtime and any AI harness — GitHub Copilot, Claude, Codex, or anything you build yourself. It uses JSON-RPC for communication and immutable state with pure reducers for session sync. What “open” means in practice: if you are building a custom enterprise agent or a domain-specific AI tool, you can now integrate it directly into VS Code’s agent runtime using the same protocol Copilot uses. You get persistent sessions, synchronized state across windows, and access to all the AHP channel types — chats, terminals, changesets. Microsoft is not gatekeeping the runtime anymore. That is a meaningful shift for teams building internal AI tooling. ## Persistent Sessions and Remote Agents One of the persistent frustrations with earlier versions of the Agent Host was losing session context on window close. That is fixed in this release. Agent sessions now survive window closures and reconnects — if the connection drops, the client reconnects and either replays missed actions or gets a fresh state snapshot. No lost context. More importantly, agent sessions can now run on remote machines. The Agent Host runs as a standalone process and exposes AHP over WebSocket. Connect to it via SSH or a dev tunnel, and your local VS Code window is just a client. Browser access also works at [insiders.vscode.dev/agents](https://insiders.vscode.dev/agents). For teams running compute-heavy agents or developers working against cloud infrastructure, this is the remote execution story VS Code has been building toward. ## Multi-root Workspaces and Session Hierarchies Two more additions worth knowing: multi-root workspace support (experimental) and chat session hierarchies. Multi-root support means Claude and Copilot sessions now span all folders in a multi-root workspace, with agents smart enough to resolve workspace references by project name — you can tell an agent “run this in the vscode workspace” without providing an absolute path. Session hierarchies organize related chats as children of a parent session, so you can see which conversations need attention without hunting through a flat list. ## Update Now VS Code 1.136 is rolling out to stable users now. Check your version from **Help > About**. The full release notes, including additional editor, browser, terminal, and accessibility improvements, are in the [official changelog](https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_136). For the architecture behind Agent Host and AHP, Microsoft’s [August 26 blog post](https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2026/08/26/agent-host-architecture) covers the design decisions in depth, and the [agent host documentation](https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/agents/concepts/agent-host) explains the protocol and channel model. Coverage from [Neowin](https://www.neowin.net/news/visual-studio-code-1136-adds-agent-merge-preview/) has additional context on the Agent Merge preview rollout. VS Code has spent 2026 turning itself into an agent runtime. Agent Merge is the feature that makes that visible. The open AHP is the part that makes it durable.