Last week, Visual Studio shipped its April update (18.5), and the theme is clear: the IDE is evolving from a text editor with AI suggestions into an agent orchestrator . Cloud agents now launch directly from the IDE, custom agents travel with you across projects, and IntelliSense finally stops fighting Copilot for screen space. If you've been waiting for Visual Studio to feel less like "Copilot bolted on" and more like "AI-first tooling," this is the update that changes the trajectory. Cloud Agents: Offload Work Without Leaving the IDE The headline feature is cloud agent integration. Previously, if you wanted to use GitHub's cloud coding agent, you opened a browser, navigated to your repo, and started a session. Now you do it directly from Visual Studio. Here's the workflow: Open Copilot Chat, select Cloud from the agent picker, and describe the task.…