VS Code: AI Chat Gets Smarter & Playwright Powers Up
Twenty pull requests merged today focusing heavily on AI chat improvements and developer tooling enhancements. Major highlights include a new Playwright service bootstrap, enhanced chat agent functionality with better model handling, and a comprehensive rename tool for symbol management. The team also tackled UI polish with theme updates and debugging improvements.
Duration: PT3M59S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from VS Code.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: VS Code
- Published: 2026-02-17T11:13:53Z
- Audio duration: PT3M59S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Hey there, code friends! Welcome back to another episode of the VS Code podcast. I'm your host, and wow, do we have a packed day to dig into! February 17th brought us twenty merged pull requests and a whole bunch of additional commits that are going to make your coding life so much better.
Let's jump right into the big story today - the VS Code team has been absolutely crushing it with AI chat improvements. Don Jayamanne merged a really smart change that hides models contributed by background agents. You know how sometimes your chat interface gets cluttered with models you don't really need to see?…
Speaking of chat improvements, Justin Chen has been on fire with UI polish. He fixed an issue where hooks weren't showing up properly in thinking and subagent titles - those little details that make the difference between a good experience and a great one. Plus, he made sure all static subagent title parts get that…
But here's where things get really exciting - Kyle Cutler just bootstrapped an entire Playwright service! This is huge for anyone doing browser automation or testing. The PR touched thirteen files and added over 400 lines of code, including a CDP proxy server. If you're into…
J…
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