Feature Request: Copilot Terminal Awareness for Long-Running or Error-Prone Commands

[meganrogge]

Context:
From @karthiknadig: The chat agent can run long-lived or error-prone terminal commands, and Copilot remains unaware of what’s happening in the terminal. This limits its ability to provide timely suggestions or detect inefficiencies.

Problem:

• Inefficient commands (e.g. redundant builds) go unnoticed.
• Repeated errors or warnings receive no guidance.
• Copilot has no visibility into command failures unless prompted.

Proposal:

Allow Copilot to (optionally) observe terminal output to:

• Detect repeated errors or warnings and suggest fixes.
• Recommend command optimizations (e.g., caching, watch mode).
• Proactively offer help when commands fail (e.g., “Want help debugging this?”).
• Reply to in terminal prompts like Y/N

Questions:

• We already have diagnostic awareness for tasks. Should we introduce dynamic problem matchers for terminals?
• How would users feel about terminal output sharing?
• How would we parse the output?

[meganrogge]

Related:
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot/issues/16430#issuecomment-2941867495
#251058

[Tyriar]

Related: #253263

[meganrogge]

From discussion with @Tyriar:

• Follow polling approach used for tasks for background terminals monitor inactive or idol task status, poll for info vscode-copilot-chat#166
• Detect Y/N (and similar) in the output via regex and return it to the llm so it asks the user and is unblocked