VS Code 1.118, released April 29, now automatically adds GitHub Copilot as a co-author on any commit where it makes changes. It's on by default. You can disable it with the git.addAICoAuthor setting, but Microsoft wants AI contributions documented in your commit history, not hidden. And there's a real legal question here. The U.S. Copyright Office has repeatedly ruled that non-human authors can't hold copyright, most recently affirmed in the Thaler v. Perlmutter case. If Copilot is listed as a co-author on your commits, it could complicate copyright claims on that code. Some companies already require AI-generated code to stay under 30% of any file to maintain protectability. Making co-authoring opt-out rather than opt-in is a bold move given how unsettled this legal territory remains.
The release also pushes hard on agentic development. Remote control for Copilot CLI sessions lets you monitor and steer terminal-based agents from GitHub.com or your phone, so work doesn't stall when you step away. The VS Code Agents app, still in preview for Insiders builds, now shares state with the main editor, supports Claude agents alongside Copilot, and runs in a browser via Dev Tunnels. Semantic indexing works across all repositories now, not just GitHub and Azure DevOps, giving agents better context for answering questions about your code. All of this points to agents that work alongside you all day, not just in quick bursts. They need persistence, cross-tool awareness, and the ability to keep running when you're not watching.
Token efficiency improvements, including prompt caching and a new tool search mechanism, matter too. Agents burn through tokens fast, and costs add up. Anything that makes each request more useful without more tokens is a practical win for teams running agents at scale.