Key Challenges Encountered in Agent Mode and Recommendations for Improvement

[tychop]

In Agent mode, the following issues significantly impact usability and workflow efficiency:

• Repeated authorization prompts are required to read or edit files, sometimes dozens of times per session.
• Symlinks must be manually created in the project root to allow Copilot access to shared Swift packages located outside the root directory, further compounded by the repeated permission requests.
• Copilot occasionally becomes inconsistent in determining which files to access or modify, leading to data loss, file corruption, duplicated content, and excessive read/edit requests. This behavior feels inefficient and counterproductive for a development workflow.

It would be immensely valuable if Copilot offered a command-line interface for agentic operations (similar to tools like Claude Code or Warp) allowing developers to manage everything directly from the terminal. Unfortunately, those tools aren’t currently permitted in our environment because we only are allowed to use company CoPilot based solutions, which is a shame, as they provide a far smoother experience compared to IDE-based plugins.

[silenceJialuo]

Hi @tychop, thanks for reaching out! For the issues you mentioned, could you please share a demo or a sample project that we can use to reproduce the problem? That would be extremely helpful. cc @lijie-lee

Regarding the command-line interface for agentic operations, just to clarify—are you looking for a Copilot CLI–style experience, or could you share any demos for Claude Code or Warp if you have them? This will help us better understand your expectations.

[testforstephen]

@tychop thank you for great feedback.

Repeated authorization prompts are required to read or edit files, sometimes dozens of times per session.
Symlinks must be manually created in the project root to allow Copilot access to shared Swift packages located outside the root directory, further compounded by the repeated permission requests.

They're good feedback. I can understand it's annoying to keep popping up dialogs for confirmation. We will add auto approve feature to allow you to bypass the confirmation. And improving swift package management support is on our roadmap as well.

Copilot occasionally becomes inconsistent in determining which files to access or modify, leading to data loss, file corruption, duplicated content, and excessive read/edit requests. This behavior feels inefficient and counterproductive for a development workflow

In the latest pre-release 0.45.154, we have fixed a critical issue about editing agent writing contents into wrong files. Could you try it to see if it fixes your concern.