[GHCP] Easier Multiple Named Chat Tabs | Easier Multiple Active Simultaneous Concurrent Conversations Chat Tabs

[laelhalawani]

Feature Request: Support for Multiple Simultaneous Chat Sessions in GitHub Copilot for VS Code

It would be extremely useful to support multiple named chat conversations for specialized roles in GitHub Copilot in the side chat panel, allowing users to work sequentially but in parallel chat histories - just like in-editor multiple chats work. This would provide a large comfort and clarity increase, while avoiding many coordination issues and complexities of true concurrency (as proposed in #242318 ).

Why this matters:

When working with CLI-based agents like Gemini or Claude, I typically maintain 4+ active chat tabs, each named, launched with a shortcut command, dedicated to a specific role or task—e.g., architect, developer (backend, frontend, ops), or QA. While they share access to documentation, each agent focuses only on its domain, dramatically improving task efficiency and reducing off-topic drift, as well as reducing to almost none the risk of editing the same files at the same time.

This approach mirrors how a real team works—clear ownership, focused context, and reduced cognitive load.

Example Workflow:

1. A new feature is requested.

2. Architect agent researches online, gathers documentation, and creates a high-level design and tasks.md .

3. Developer agent reads the docs, picks a task, and creates a new task.md with a step-by-step plan.

4. Developer progresses through task.md steps, tracking progress in the same task file.

5. Once complete, the QA agent reads the task.md and docs, tests the implementation, and prepares a task-qa-report.md

6. If issues are found:

   • For implementation bugs, the developer reviews the task-qa-report.mdand fixes the issue.
   • For design flaws, the architect revisits the docs and task-qa-report.md and updates the design as needed, and adds relevant task to the tasks.md and to the task.md with necessary changes

7. This loop continues until QA passes.

8. Architect marks the top-level task as complete.

9. Developer moves on to the next task and creates another task-specific task.md

This modular, chat-tabbed approach is vastly more effective than maintaining a single monolithic conversation. It also improves token efficiency by scoping prompts and context to just the relevant agent, instead of loading the entire project history each time. Having tabs directly in the side panel would make navigating and previewing the work much easier.

Suggested Implementation:

• Add support for multiple chat tabs within Copilot Chat side panel in VS Code.
• Each tab should maintain its own context, configuration, and history - just like having multiple conversations in editor work.
• Users can name tabs (e.g., “Architect,” “Backend Dev,” “QA”) to reflect their role or function - this could also be added to the multi conversation in editor.
• Simplify saving roles and prompts for the roles or creating these specialized agents
• Add an UI indication which tabs have made edits last or have pending edits to keep
• This complements, rather than replaces, concurrent development workflows (e.g., using worktrees with multiple instances of VS Code running then resolving merge conflicts with an agent, or in the future handling this directly within the UI as proposed in #242318 )

Impact:

This feature would significantly increase comfort of using multiple conversations and make GitHub Copilot more suitable for complex, full-stack projects involving multi-agent workflows, while still allowing good preview of the edits.
Personally, this would be a strong enough reason to switch back from CLI-based agents to Copilot within VS Code.
With this approach it would still be down to the user to ensure the agents don't edit the same files in parallel, and the current handling of file edits would suffice. GH could provide some preconfigured roles for an easier startup, I'm happy to share my prompts for that.

Known Workaround:

Move the conversations to in-editor chats or in the new window.

The issue with this is that it gets really cluttered and obscures the editor view.

[vs-code-engineering]

This feature request is now a candidate for our backlog. The community has 60 days to upvote the issue. If it receives 20 upvotes we will move it to our backlog. If not, we will close it. To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!

[vs-code-engineering]

This feature request has not yet received the 20 community upvotes it takes to make to our backlog. 10 days to go. To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!

[vs-code-engineering]

🙁 In the last 60 days, this feature request has received less than 20 community upvotes and we closed it. Still a big Thank You to you for taking the time to create this issue! To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!

[garrettlondon1]

Re-starting this discussion, there is really not a good solution for multi-conversation chat mode and room for a lot of improvement.

In addition to what this author is suggesting, it would be great to scope chat windows to a directory, where it can provide other running agents progress about task completion

src/
src/frontend - agent 1
src/backend - agent 2

Agent 1 & Agent 2 can communicate with each other about progress in the respective directories asynchronously without stepping on file changes

[arjunghosh]

Yes this is needed