Microsoft released VS Code 1.142 on October 14, and the biggest change is one that not everyone will see right away. The Copilot harness, which until now you had to pick yourself from the harness picker in the chat input, is being progressively rolled out as the default harness for new sessions. Microsoft says the move follows "overwhelmingly positive" feedback. If it has reached you, the harness picker shows Copilot when you start a new session.
The Copilot harness is built on the Copilot SDK, a shared foundation meant to align behavior and improvements across Copilot products. In VS Code it runs sessions through the Agent Host, so a session can keep working in the background and you can pick it up from either the editor window or the separate Agents window. Chat titles now also show which harness is active, such as Copilot or Codex.
Feedback on the harness also brought back an old favorite. Ask is now a built-in agent in the Copilot harness again, and it's read-only. Microsoft says feedback showed a dedicated read-only experience is still valuable, which is handy when you want answers about your code without the agent editing anything. You choose it from the agent picker.
The model picker has been redesigned too. Copilot models and bring-your-own-key (BYOK) models now sit in separate tabs, and hovering over a model lets you set its thinking level and context window size, so switching models mid-task takes fewer steps. That matters more now that the model you choose decides what you pay, which we covered in GitHub Copilot AI Credits: GitHub Now Bills by the Token, and Your Model Choice Sets the Price. BYOK users with a stateless Responses API endpoint also get a new option to send the full conversation history with each request.
For companies, administrators can now enforce agent sandboxing and permission policies and control which permission modes developers can use. When an organization sets those policies, VS Code requires the Copilot harness in the Agent Host for full chat sessions so it can actually enforce them, and older local chats are moved over when they're opened. While the policies apply, Claude, Codex and terminal chat are unavailable. Admins who need more time can temporarily keep the old Local harness.
There are two smaller additions worth knowing. Canvases, now in preview, open an interactive view beside the chat where you and the agent work on the same artifact, such as a Kanban board for planning tasks. They work in the desktop app for local sessions that use the Copilot harness and have to be switched on in settings first. And in the Agents window you can now ask the agent to move a chat to another folder or a new Git worktree without losing the conversation, though it only works in sessions that use the Codex harness or Codex in Interactive mode and contain one chat and one local folder.