Prevent Copilot Agent from automatically opening files it has modified.

[joshmouch]

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Copilot Feature Area

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I have four topics/issues:

1. Tab craziness:
   When using Copilot Agent mode in VS Code, tabs are constantly opening up as the agent is working on them. Why is this and can it be disabled? After each agent session, you almost spend just as much time figuring out which tabs to keep open and which to close. Clicking on a file in the "X file changed ... Keep Undo" area is a better place to keep tabs on what the agent is modifying.

2. Changed files takes up too much real estate:
   My second complaint is that this "X files changed" area is not collapsible. If I have multiple copilot chats open, this area can easily take up the entire pane. Right now, I'm literally looking at a copilot chat where I can't see the conversation because the entire pane is just the files changed list and the chat input box.

3. Changed files can't be cleaned up.
   For long agent sessions, the agent will summarize the conversation to preserve context. However, it'll never clean up the "files changed" area... nor is there a way to clean it up manually. This means that despite the summarization feature you recently added, new conversations still need to be created eventually in order to not have 100+ files listed here.

4. "COPILOT CHAT DEBUG" IS UNBELIEVABLE USEFUL
   I cannot stress enough how great this feature is!!!!!
   Please add more features to the Copilot chat debug and make it easier to get to. Add a setting where it'll enable clicking on a message in the chat that'll cause the specific .copilotmd file associated with that tool call or panel/editAgent interaction or whatever to open up. This button can be right next to the "edit" and "undo" buttons that appear when you click on a message in the chat.
   This will be a HUGE HELP to developers who are trying to optimize the context for better overall performance (e.g. optimize the prompts/instructions/tools/etc. in order to make Copilot work better).
   For example, I looked at one copilotmd file and saw just how much context my tools were using and decided it made sense to explore different chat modes (that reference toolsets) or maybe targeted instruction files or something (I haven't found my solution yet). But the point is that seeing how much context those tools were taking up clearly pointed me to the need to optimize it to make Copilot work better.

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[micodev]

same here

[dieterm]

I would also like the ability to disable automatically opening newly generated files or modified files by copilot.
There is another important issue with this. Sometimes (not always) I get an error in the copilot generation process that it cannot modify a file because it is in use by another process or because the file is open in visual studio.
Specifically with Winforms Forms and UserControls this happens.
I think because Visual studio automatically performs actions in the background when a new file is added to a project or solution.
So ironically copilot blocks his own files by automatically opening them.

[elcharitas]

Can't believe there's been no response to this

[n-r-w]

The most disgusting thing is that this behavior causes constant corruption of new files when working in golang.

[kreare]

+1 on this. It's absolutely annoying (and a waste of resources) having tens/hundreds of files open every time a single line of code is changed by an AI Agent.

[Hronom]

Same

[cijhho123]

same

[fares-adesso]

@pierceboggan pls consider!

[thewh1teagle]

Please! it should be one simple flag

[ekomsctr]

Big up! Also make us choose to prevent copilot to bring up VS if minimized when he updates a plan tab!