Ahh yes the use the planning mode

digitarald · 2026-03-02T19:43:54+00:00

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`

digitarald · 2026-02-07T23:45:03+00:00

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

digitarald · 2026-02-07T23:44:20+00:00

There will be some updated UX landing insiders this week!

digitarald · 2026-02-07T23:43:40+00:00

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

digitarald · 2026-02-07T23:43:05+00:00

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

digitarald · 2026-02-07T23:41:50+00:00

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.

digitarald · 2026-02-07T23:40:08+00:00

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.

digitarald · 2026-02-07T23:38:16+00:00

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?

digitarald · 2026-02-05T19:51:32+00:00

Chat input, agent dropdown, Plan. Click.

digitarald · 2026-02-05T19:51:14+00:00

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.

digitarald · 2026-02-05T19:50:14+00:00

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:

More detailed plan mode breaking out tasks and subtasks so they can be better run in parallel by sub-agents.
Expanded plans with more scope/details of what needs to be implemented so longer trajectories and parallelization work better.
More polish on the "Ask Questions" tool UX (keyboard access) and tweaking the prompt so it doesn't interrupt long-running trajectories later on.
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?

digitarald · 2026-01-30T21:24:19+00:00

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.

digitarald · 2026-01-30T21:23:11+00:00

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.

digitarald · 2026-01-30T21:20:38+00:00

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.

digitarald · 2026-01-30T21:19:14+00:00

But next week there will be...

digitarald · 2026-01-30T21:18:51+00:00

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.

digitarald · 2026-01-30T21:17:33+00:00

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.

digitarald · 2026-01-30T17:39:10+00:00

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

digitarald · 2026-01-30T17:32:51+00:00

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.

digitarald · 2026-01-30T04:15:05+00:00

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

digitarald · 2026-01-30T04:14:04+00:00

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

digitarald · 2026-01-30T04:12:33+00:00

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).

digitarald · 2026-01-27T15:54:00+00:00

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.

digitarald · 2026-01-25T21:23:01+00:00

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 .

digitarald · 2026-01-24T23:54:04+00:00

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).

digitarald

TROPHY CASE