Copilot Agent mode in VSCode Stable produced _SUMMARY.md files that were not requested.

[thorrsson]

Does this issue occur when all extensions are disabled?: Yes/No

• VS Code Version:

Version: 1.100.3 (Universal)
Commit: 258e40f
Date: 2025-06-02T13:30:54.273Z (1 wk ago)
Electron: 34.5.1
ElectronBuildId: 11369351
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.0
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0

• OS Version:
  OS: Darwin arm64 24.5.0

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Requested that Copilot agent mode (Using Claude Sonnet 4) perform changes to a code base
2. Copilot completed the changes and then decided to produce _SUMMARY.md files with a summary of the work done.

This happened on multiple prompts, producing different _SUMMARY.md files in different places in the repo. This was not requested in the prompt, nor was there a copilot-instructions.md file in the repo that could have been interpreted as requesting the summary files

Example 1:

Example 2:

I've not been able to reproduce this today but it was happening on Monday and Tuesday this week.

/cc @isidorn

[isidorn]

I do not know how this could happen. Assigning first to Rob to get his thoughts.

[TheCrazyLex]

This keeps randomly happening to me as well

[roblourens]

I just read in https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/claude-4-best-practices#reduce-file-creation-in-agentic-coding that Claude 4 likes to do this. I will try prompting it to not do that, but it's hard to know whether it's working. Can you share a prompt, and as much of the response as possible, that lead to this?

[vs-code-engineering]

This issue has been closed automatically because it needs more information and has not had recent activity. See also our issue reporting guidelines.

Happy Coding!

[alebar42]

I get this after every prompt using Claude 4 in agent mode

[isidorn]

@alebar42 can you repro with https://code.visualstudio.com/insiders/
If yes, do you have repro steps?