Copilot ignoring whitelist and 'Allow x in this Session/Workspace' disabled

[IanGraingerGMSL]

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When Copilot wants to run a script, I have to press Approve. I don't want to always press approve when it's just running the linter for the 10th time this session.

There is now a dropdown which gives me the option of 'Allow Auto Approve...' - but I don't want YOLO mode. There's already a load of things set by default in my chat.tools.terminal.autoApprove Code/User/settings.json - but it seems to be ignoring them. I also sometimes see a list of other commands in that list like 'Enable x in this Session/Workspace' - but they don't always show, and when they are shown are greyed out. The only one I can interact with seems to be YOLO mode (Enable Auto Approve...)

I can't seem to find any information about this problem by Googling - all I see is people (foolishly) asking for YOLO mode. I am not looking for that - I am just looking to get Copliot working in a 'normal' way - where well understood commands can be run without me having to press 'Approve' every 10 seconds.

My Copilot license is through my company, which has a 'Business' NOT 'Enterprise' license. I am wondering if there's an org level 'Enable tool auto-approve' that I need a manager to switch on? But if there is, I can't find any help about what it might be called! (Again, I don't want YOLO mode! Just normal mode!)

Enable terminal auto approve

There's a chance my problem is just to do with the messages being misleading? The Enable terminal auto approve? dialog Says:

This will enable a configurable subset of commands to run in the terminal autonomously. It provides best effort protections and assumes the agent is not acting maliciously.

If this is YOLO mode - then it wouldn't have a configurable subset of commands. So it isn't YOLO mode? Its using the whitelist? But if its using the whitelist - that is not a 'best effort protection'. That's a whitelist - which is fine - I'll just only whitelist commands that aren't dangerous?...

[shivrajcodez]

What you’re seeing is expected behavior right now. Copilot’s terminal tool approval system is still pretty restrictive.

The chat.tools.terminal.autoApprove entries in settings.json don’t always override the approval prompt because Copilot still requires manual approval for many commands during a session. In other words, the setting is more of a hint than a guaranteed bypass.

A couple of things that can affect it:

Copilot Business policies – organizations can restrict automatic tool execution. If your company admin has tighter policies enabled, Copilot may force manual approval regardless of your local settings.

Session-level permissions – the options like “Enable in this Session/Workspace” appear only when Copilot considers the command eligible. If the command isn’t on its allowlist, those options will stay greyed out.

Terminal safety rules – even common commands like linters may still trigger approval because they involve shell execution.

Unfortunately there isn’t currently a granular “approve safe commands automatically” mode. It’s basically:

manual approvals

or full auto-approve (“YOLO mode”)

If this is happening frequently with things like linters, formatters, or test commands, the best workaround right now is to run those tasks through VS Code tasks, npm scripts, or Makefiles, and have Copilot call those instead.

If GitHub adds per-command auto approval or trusted command lists, that would solve this problem much better than the current all-or-nothing approach.

[IanGraingerGMSL]

Sorry, no, I don't understand. What you're describing sounds identical to a whitelist. How is it anything other than 'per-command auto approval'? And if that's the case - why isn't it respecting that list?

I'm afraid I'm no closer to understanding what's going on! Why have a whitelist if it doesn't do anything? You're saying there's only 2 modes: 'approve everything' and 'YOLO/approve nothing'. Then, separately to those features, there's a whitelist, which is ignored!? Surely the VSCode team haven't wasted time adding a feature that isn't used?

I'll need to ask about Business Policies I guess - but my manager isn't going to know what to enable or disable if I can't tell him what the policy is called - and if this is controlled that way, why isn't it mentioned in any docs? And why doesn't the interface point me to that being the issue?

[julianpung]

Did I miss some changes recently?
I used to have the dropdown button with option "Allow x in this session", but haven't seen it lately.
All I see now is a simple Allow button, which I have to press repeatedly.

This is very frustrating when the agent loop is working on failing unit tests and I have to allow running the tests every single time.

[IanGraingerGMSL]

@julianpung Mine is doing this too today! Seems like something has broken, yeah? That looks like the old version of the dialog inputs?

My problem turned out to be that I had to reset my VSCode settings, then it started working as it should!

[IanGraingerGMSL]

I worked this out by trial-and-error.

It seems there's some setting which had broken this in my ~/.vscode/settings.json file - reverting this made it instantly work as everyone else was reporting! I must admit I haven't bothered to look at which setting broke it, though.

I'm going to close this discussion now. Hopefully this fix will help someone else in the future!