# 2 November: the agent can work inside Windows VMs, and new VMs answer SSH sooner 2026-11-02 · Product > The chat agent can now run PowerShell commands and read or write files inside your Windows VM over SSH. New VMs reach SSH in minutes, and a prepared machine makes it faster still. Until 2 November the agent could create a Windows VM and then do nothing with it. That gap is closed. *The three areas of the Windows VMs on 2 November.* Text version Agent tools vm_exec, vm_write_file, vm_read_file over SSH. First start measured on test VMs. Network fixes: DNS for guests, port forwards removed on delete, worker choice without an image. ## What the agent can do The agent has three tools for the VM selected in the chat: vm_exec for PowerShell, vm_write_file and vm_read_file. Each VM gets its own key, and its host key is pinned on first contact. One held connection per VM answers a command in about 8 ms at the median, measured on test VMs, instead of about 2 seconds. ## Starting sooner On 2 November we measured test VMs: SSH answered after about 345 seconds, where before it often did not answer at all. Each worker now keeps one prepared Windows VM (4 GB RAM per worker, approved). A new VM takes a prepared one when it is ready, so SSH answers at once. Another size takes about a minute longer. If anything fails, the normal path runs. ## Fixes behind it Guests got DNS servers they could not reach, so they could not fetch OpenSSH, Tailscale or updates. They now get DNS from the worker. Deleting a VM left its port forward behind, which made the next VM on that port unreachable. That is fixed, and the forwards of running VMs were set again. A VM created without an image now picks a worker that has the image. These numbers come from our own tests on test VMs. Your first start can differ.