VS Code Is Becoming an Agent Control Plane — and Most Teams Haven’t Noticed Yet

VS Code 1.110 ships a set of features — agent plugins, hooks, persistent session memory, chat session forking, context compaction, and browser tools — that together form a governance and orchestration layer for AI agents inside the IDE. Agent plugins bundle slash commands, custom agents, MCP servers, and hooks into Git-distributed packages, enabling platform engineers to version-control, review, and enforce AI agent behavior across teams. Hooks allow deterministic policy enforcement at agent lifecycle points, independent of model decision-making. Industry analyst Mitch Ashley frames this as a third conception of the IDE: not a workbench, but an agent orchestration platform. The parallel to infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD is explicit — agent configuration is becoming a managed, auditable artifact, and VS Code is positioning itself as the control plane before most teams have recognized the shift.