Free AI in IDEs is moving to paid models. The latest update to VS Code adds transparent cost tracking and multi-chat workflows to help developers manage their AI usage and costs.
Free AI in IDEs is moving to paid models. The latest update to VS Code adds transparent cost tracking and multi-chat workflows to help developers manage their AI usage and costs.
Microsoft has released Visual Studio Code 1.126. This time, the company focused on several innovations: it added the ability to see the total cost of chat sessions to identify too "expensive" conversations, enabled support for multiple parallel chats within a single Copilot host session with multi-agent support, and also allowed you to safely browse new folders in restricted mode, Neowin reports .
The era of free AI in IDEs is coming to an end. To help you control your costs, VS Code now lets you see the full cost of a chat session, not just individual replies. This should provide more transparency into which sessions are consuming the most credits, so users can better manage their AI usage and spend less.
You can launch and manage multiple agent sessions simultaneously in the Agents window. In this update, a Copilot session launched from an agent host can contain multiple chats simultaneously.
Explaining how this feature works, Microsoft writes: “Imagine that your main chat is busy implementing a feature. Instead of waiting or interrupting it, select “New Chat” (+) in the session toolbar to open a second chat in the same session. You can use it to review changes you’ve already made, draft tests, or write documentation. Both chats run simultaneously, and each one keeps its own conversation history. You can switch between tabs and pick up right where you left off.”
Microsoft is also removing the pop-up that appeared when you opened an untrusted folder. Now, when you open a new folder, it will automatically start in restricted mode. Instead, you will see a banner that allows you to adjust the trust level for that folder. Microsoft made this change to make it easier to start reviewing code without having to immediately grant it full access.
If you already have VS Code installed, you can check for updates directly in the application to get this new version. Otherwise, you can download it from the official Visual Studio Code website.
