Copilot Agent spins forever on unpermissioned action

[peterwwillis]

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Bug

Body

If you tell a Copilot Agent to do something, but your repository's settings require specific Actions be whitelisted, and you haven't whitelisted them, the Agent will spin forever waiting to start up. You have to manually cancel the Agent, then check the logs, find the error about the Action that needs to be added, add it to your settings, then start the Agent again.

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[tanmaysinghx]

Potential Root Cause & Workaround
It looks like the Copilot Orchestrator isn't catching the 403 Forbidden or Policy Violation signal from the Actions API early enough. Instead of bubbling the permission error up to the UI, the Agent enters a polling loop, waiting for a status change that can't happen.

Current "Manual" Fix:

Kill the Agent process manually.

Check Settings > Actions > General to see the "blocked" entry in the audit log.

Whitelist the specific Action.

Restart.

Proposed Feature/Bug Fix:
The Agent should perform a pre-flight permission check against the repository's action_allowed_metadata before attempting to trigger the workflow. If an Action isn't whitelisted, it should return an immediate "Permission Required" UI state with a link to the settings page, rather than spinning indefinitely.

[DevFoxxx]

Hi @peterwwillis, this 'silent failure' is a known pain point with locked-down repo policies. Here’s how to skip the infinite spinner:

1. Check the Actions Tab: don't wait for the Agent UI. Open the Actions tab in a second window immediately; the 'Action not allowed' error usually appears there long before the Agent times out.
2. Personal Fork Test: try the prompt in a personal fork with open policies first. If it works there, you know it's a whitelist issue in the main repo.
3. Use external LLMs (Gemini/Claude): when the Agent is stuck in policy limbo, just paste your code into Gemini or Claude. They don't need whitelisting to give you the fix, which you can then apply manually in seconds.