Visual Studio 2026 April Update Adds Cloud Agent Sessions, IntelliSense Priority Over Copilot

Microsoft's Visual Studio 2026 April update (v18.5.0) adds cloud agent sessions launchable directly from the IDE's Chat window, with agents creating GitHub issues and PRs on remote infrastructure. IntelliSense now takes priority over Copilot completions, showing only one suggestion at a time — resolving years of reported friction. The update supports user-level custom agents, discovers agent skills from multiple directories (.claude/skills/, .agents/skills/, .github/skills/), and introduces a Debugger agent that validates fixes against live runtime behavior. JSON editor now supports JSON Schema Draft 2019-09 and 2020-12. Copilot cloud agent starts 20% faster with Actions custom images.