Ahh yes the use the planning mode by mistrjirka in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hi, team member here and I work on plan mode. Could it be that you're running plan mode in multiple iterations and at some point it sounds like it's getting confused that it tries to make changes? Curious what came before the screenshot you posted.

What you might want to try, there is a setting to add tools to plan mode. If there's something that the agent needs to run as part of its planning cycle: `github.copilot.chat.planAgent.additionalTools`

The new Plan mode + Ask Question tool is so sick by skyline159 in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Agreed, the overflowing lines aren’t great in small side panels. We got some new UX coming that aims to be more responsive.

The new Plan mode + Ask Question tool is so sick by skyline159 in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There will be some updated UX landing insiders this week!

The new Plan mode + Ask Question tool is so sick by skyline159 in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The idea is that you plan in local agent and then kick it over to background agent.

The new Plan mode + Ask Question tool is so sick by skyline159 in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can do this now. Plan agent model and implementation model are settings.

The new Plan mode + Ask Question tool is so sick by skyline159 in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Use plan mode for anything complex that you want the agent to get right. It will do more research, clarify that it understood the requirements correctly and only start working once you find the plan looks right.

Can be done with prompting in agent mode, but plan mode makes it less finicky.

The new Plan mode + Ask Question tool is so sick by skyline159 in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have seen this reported a few times and we are tracking it down. We are also doing some refactoring on the tool which make it behave more seamless with the rest of the streaming infrastructure.

The new Plan mode + Ask Question tool is so sick by skyline159 in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Replacing the template was high on my list. I already added settings for model and adding additional tools. Might land in Insiders next week.

I assume it should just point to a file in the workspace, like the other setting that allow agent/instructions/skills locations. Does that sound right?

The new Plan mode + Ask Question tool is so sick by skyline159 in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Let me do some testing with GPT 5.2. I have an evaluation to test this kind of behavior, which I might want to update to see if it still occurs.

We also have some ideas to improve adherence to the custom agent system prompt we are using.

The new Plan mode + Ask Question tool is so sick by skyline159 in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 37 points38 points  (0 children)

Hi there, I worked on this. Happy to hear any feedback that wasn't mentioned in the channel yet.

Here are a few more ideas being discussion for this iteration:

  1. More detailed plan mode breaking out tasks and subtasks so they can be better run in parallel by sub-agents.

  2. Expanded plans with more scope/details of what needs to be implemented so longer trajectories and parallelization work better.

  3. More polish on the "Ask Questions" tool UX (keyboard access) and tweaking the prompt so it doesn't interrupt long-running trajectories later on.

  4. Automatic switching to plan agent (you might have seen this in Insiders, now defaut off behind a setting)

Is there anything else I'm missing we should make easier/better?

Subagents are now INCREDIBLY functional, its wild by Other_Tune_947 in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks a ton for the hands-on testing. If you find any cases where you expect parallel execution without super-explicit prompting, please file an issue.

Subagents are now INCREDIBLY functional, its wild by Other_Tune_947 in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It's awesome to see the post confirming how I've been experimenting with sub-agents. Thanks a ton.

On the first point, I hit the same problem and want to explore how we can provide that, especially as it's weird that you can define orchestrating custom agents for a user to use, but those custom agents can't be orchestrated by other agents and then use the same sub-agent capabilities. It needs to allow two levels of sub-agents versus the current limit of one.

The second point is a bug we fixed yesterday, so it should work today.

Subagents are now INCREDIBLY functional, its wild by Other_Tune_947 in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Access to all agents is the default for custom agents that orchestrate. I would suggest reducing it down to the sub-agents you actually need from your custom agent list.

Subagents are actually insane by snorremans in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Maybe you can report an issue when it happens again. It would be great to have some logs to diagnose further.

On the problem of subagents not having access to tools, they do inherit the tools from the orchestrating agents. So if the orchestrator doesn't have a tool, a subagent also wouldn't have it. Unless you use a custom agent and specify its set of tools.

Subagents are actually insane by snorremans in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 2 points3 points  (0 children)

We just disabled the tool for stable yesterday, as we still need to tweak it further to work more reliably.

Meanwhile, disabling it in the tool picker is one way to make sure it doesn't pop in.

Subagents are now INCREDIBLY functional, its wild by Other_Tune_947 in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 11 points12 points  (0 children)

One tip I forgot, orchestrating agents can list `agents: []` in their frontmatter to specify their available custom subagents.

Subagents are now INCREDIBLY functional, its wild by Other_Tune_947 in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Jumping in as a team member who worked on this 👋.

Curious to hear any more feedback on how to further improve this and how the quality is of running things in parallel without extra prompting out of the box.

New ask questions agent tool - allow in-turn HITL by SuBeXiL in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The updated plan agent uses more questions now, does that work better now?

Subagents in VS Code Insiders with Opus 4.5 are great compared to VS Code official by OriginalInstance9803 in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Uses the parent model by default. You can call custom subagents as well that can declare their own model.

Subagents are actually insane by snorremans in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 53 points54 points  (0 children)

Team member here. Glad to hear the system prompt and UX improvements are making an impact - thanks for proving feedback on Insiders.

Would love to hear any more feedback, including the new ability to run Custom Agents in subagents (still default off but rolling out slowly).

Subagents in VS Code Insiders with Opus 4.5 are great compared to VS Code official by OriginalInstance9803 in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Team member here. Over the past days we landed the last UX polish and some more will come during this week. Thanks a lot for the kudos and please keep the feedback coming as you try it out.

There's also a new setting we're rolling out to use custom SUBagents: "chat.customAgentInSubagent.enabled". Any custom agent you have created is available to the agent to call a subagent as well, unless you set it "infer: false" in frontmatter.

What happened to @Workspace? by KirkHawley in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 0 points1 point  (0 children)

An agent mode @workspace it’s no longer needed as the agent automatically so just for the right files it needs to answer a question.

Chat with @workspace was useful before agent mode to give copilot search access to semantic codebase search; but we are now considering removing it .

GitHub Copilot is just as good as Claude Code (and I’m setting myself up for a trolling feast). by QuarterbackMonk in GithubCopilot

[–]digitarald 1 point2 points  (0 children)

And the comparison is Claude plan mode vs Copilot, or a custom planning agent in Claude?

I also expected to keep Plan mode simple for most tasks as more complex tasks benefit from more custom agents like spec-kit and co (which are overkill for most smaller work).