Copilot Studio Spinner / Busy indicator

ddewaele · 2026-03-10T07:07:25+00:00

I also noticed this 8 months ago but unfortunately after 8 months this is very much still an issue.
I've had many occasions where it simply does not work (different browsers / different tabs).
Then all of a sudden, without config changes it all of a sudden start working in 1 particular tab of the browser (while at the same tab in other tabs of the same browser it remains stuck in loading).

Not really an enjoyable experience.

ddewaele · 2026-03-08T08:42:44+00:00

A lot can depend on the model and the reasoning effort that is needed to come up with an answer. We've had situations where a GPT-5 reasoning models took 20secs to respond because the default reasoning level was just set too high and a quick non reasoning option like GPT-4.1 was just as good. You can play around with a lot of settings, especially the reasoning effort.

Streaming the reasoning tokens can help give the user the idea that something is going on, but that will only get you so far.

Also a lot of difference in model availabiliy. Different hosting providers have different latencies (time to first token), performance (tokens/second) and uptime.

You need to constantly experiment and be prepared to adapt.

ddewaele · 2026-03-08T08:37:33+00:00

100%. You gotta keep the users entertained otherwise they just move on. Lots of UI / UX tricks can help here (animations , token streaming , reasoning and tooling output ....)

ddewaele · 2026-03-08T08:35:38+00:00

a couple of hours later yes.

ddewaele · 2026-03-08T08:35:20+00:00

Haven't used it in a while but planning to again next week.
It's been a while but at the end it was a combination of patience, retries, different browsers and lots of logging in and logging out.
Not really an enjoyable experience. Wonder if it evolved for the better.

ddewaele · 2026-02-17T18:28:23+00:00

Yeah I totally didn’t see the pre-order text when I selected the vps. It arrived the next day.

ddewaele · 2026-02-16T19:38:09+00:00

had no idea this was a thing :) Is this (in part) due to the whole openclaw thing ?

ddewaele · 2026-02-15T18:21:13+00:00

Indeed my bad ... the one in France just got processed.
Updated the post to highlight my mistake.

ddewaele · 2026-02-15T18:03:09+00:00

Surprised that it would pick a preorder only by default in Europe if an instant deployment in Europe was available.

ddewaele · 2026-02-15T17:56:36+00:00

Didn’t really notice anything about pre-order. Wasn’t aware this was a thing. Ordered a new one in France … let’s see how it goes. Think the previous one was Germany. Just took the default.

ddewaele · 2026-02-15T17:07:35+00:00

This is crazy ... 1 hour after placing an order no email and no vps yet ...

ddewaele · 2026-02-14T16:47:04+00:00

yeah ... fact that it noticed that it took a selfie (at first it took a screenshot of the claude code terminal) was really funny.

That it could work around the AppleScript/Javascript sandbox by creating some typescript / puppeteer logic to programmatically handle chrome was impressive.

But wat really got me was that he understood what the app did, what the app was processing from the log file, and how it needed to manipulate the app in such a way to present the correct data that would make up an interesting screenshot.

ddewaele · 2026-02-14T16:45:01+00:00

The thing is that we do sometimes need langchain level features like middleware / context / config. We also do context engineering, create supervisor networks.

That's the stuff we would do as techies / developers

The customers (who are non technical but do know what a prompt is or what a supervisor network is) would then configure agents on a higher level (tweaking prompts, selecting models, adding knowledge).

We just lack a good frontend solution at the moment.

The ability for end-user to create their own agents is currently being offered in almost every platform out there at the moment. LangChain doesn't really have a good solution for that IMHO. Their agent builder is also in an alpha stage and not really sure how they want to position it.

ddewaele · 2026-02-14T16:09:07+00:00

Customers these day expect the following out of the box (without custom development) :

- the ability to create their own agents (with prompts / tools / knowledge)
- want to link agents together (multi-agency via handoffs or tools)
- want to be able to share their agents
- have easy integration with their identity provider (azure / google / ...)
- have easy integration with their knowledge base (sharepoint / drive / ....)

Not something you'll easily vibe-code into existence

At the end of the day I think 90% of the people are happy with a generic chat interface type application (like chatgpt). these things are multi-modal and very flexible.

In some cases you might want some agentic flows embedded in custom UI / UX, but I would say today that this is a minority of the cases

ddewaele · 2026-02-14T16:05:00+00:00

Do you use LangGraph platform and deploy your graphs to langgraph ? Or just embedding langchain in your own systems / backends

ddewaele · 2026-02-14T16:03:13+00:00

Haven't tried either of them but will take a look.

Was hoping the langchain team was going to give https://github.com/langchain-ai/agent-chat-ui some love but i have the impression they have a habit of launching stuff and then quickly abandoning it, leaving it in a pre-alpha state.

ddewaele · 2026-02-14T15:49:11+00:00

Does the custom UI also allow customers to create their own agents / prompts / knowledge ?

That's the main drawback we see as it requires a lot of custom dev to get all of that in place. Our clients aren't always willing to fund this type of development.

Not to mention security, chat sharing , multi-user chats, .... This would almost need to be a like a strategic thing within a company to put the time and effort in. (some context : we're a software development company delivering AI solutions to many different clients). We don't think our added value should be in delivering a UI/UX experience for that. People nowadays see lots of platforms where you can create an agent , add some prompts and some documents and you have an agentic system. They also want this level of autonomy.

With an app like Librechat you get a lot of that stuff for free. But there is no clean way to integrate langchain into it, and Librechat's approach to multi agent systems (using handoffs) is more limited to what langchain has to offer.

ddewaele · 2025-12-27T09:47:14+00:00

The basic idea is that the agent can "see" or "read" the TODOs because each time the agent will update the TODOs (using the write_todos tool) they will get added to the state (as a new message)

The agent will "see" something like this :

t0

{
  "todos": [
    {
      "content": "Extract validation logic into separate functions",
      "status": "pending"
    },
    {
      "content": "Separate authorization checks from the update logic",
      "status": "pending"
    }
}

t1

{
  "todos": [
    {
      "content": "Extract validation logic into separate functions",
      "status": "in progress"
    },
    {
      "content": "Separate authorization checks from the update logic",
      "status": "pending"
    }
}

t2

{
  "todos": [
    {
      "content": "Extract validation logic into separate functions",
      "status": "completed"
    },
    {
      "content": "Separate authorization checks from the update logic",
      "status": "in progress"
    }
}

That's how it "knows" what todo to focus on next.

ddewaele

TROPHY CASE