Setting up environment and cloning repository after each prompt

[therealremco]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Copilot Cloud Agent

Body

Apparently there were some changes to Copilot while I was asleep last night. Instead of the agent modes and model selector under the chat I just see "Cloud". Also in the chat itself. And three buttons: "Checkout", "Merge" and "Apply".

In terms of behaviour:

• responses have become very slow (a lot of tool calls and regex evaluations passing by)
• after every new prompt, the agent starts by cloning the entire repository
• the three buttons result in GitHub errors: "Unable to find pull request from chat context."
• every output of the agent was being rendered twice (until I reloaded the workspace)
• I feel like my credits are disappearing much faster because of extra overhead (maybe just paranoia...)

It's a bit like getting in your car and discovering all the controls have been moved somewhere else...

Does anyone know if this is normal behaviour and small glitches? Should I do something different?

(Mac OS 26.5.2, VSC 1.134.0, Copilot v0.62.0)

[MuzammilCk]

That definitely does not sound like the expected "everything is working normally" experience.

The Cloud label and the Checkout / Merge / Apply actions suggest you might have been switched onto the Copilot Cloud Agent workflow or an updated experiment/rollout. In that model some repository setup and tool activity can happen server-side so seeing more cloning/tool calls than with the agent modes is plausible.

That said, several of the things you describe sound like glitches rather than intended behavior:

• Cloning the entire repository after each prompt would be concerning especially if it happens repeatedly within the same session.

• Unable to find pull request from chat context for all three actions suggests the UI is showing PR‑related controls without the expected PR context.

• Responses being rendered twice is clearly a UI/state issue.

• The increased latency could be partly explained by the extra Cloud Agent setup and tooling. It should not make the experience consistently unusable.

• On credits: I do not assume the visible tool activity maps directly to proportional credit consumption without confirmation but I understand why it looks worrying.

First troubleshooting steps would be to update/reload VS Code and the Copilot extension sign out. Sign in if necessary and try a fresh workspace and chat to see whether cloning and duplicated rendering persist. If they do capture the Copilot and VS Code logs. Report them because the combination of repeated cloning, broken action buttons and duplicated output sounds more like a rollout or state‑management problem than normal intended behavior.

You are definitely not alone, in finding a workflow change disorienting though. "Getting in your car and discovering all the controls have moved" is a pretty accurate description.

[MuzammilCk]

It feels like your Copilot Cloud Agent session is stuck or broken of just acting weird. I suggest you try reloading VS Code starting a Copilot chat/workspace and updating/reinstalling the Copilot extension.

The way the system keeps cloning the repository gives you the answers twice and shows “Unable to find pull request from chat context” errors is definitely not how it should work. If these problems stay even after you do a restart you should report the issue as a bug and make sure to attach the Copilot logs.

[therealremco]

Thanks @MuzammilCk for the quick reply! I think this was a case of "idiot user exception", I probably clicked cloud harness under the chat by accident. Not having used this before I didn't realise what was happening. That said, the behaviour is not what would be expected, and I'm not exactly sure what the point of this toggle is as I am using cloud models anyway. Maybe I should try RTFM 😆

I am going to try and get my project back into a coherent state and move on! Thanks again!

Update: I am reading the manual. The option "cloud" means the whole harness + model runs in the cloud, not on my machine. That probably explains why it needs to read the repo directly from github every time, it cannot actually access my machine directly. Live and learn!

[MuzammilCk]

😂 Haha, that clears it up! We have all had least one RTFM moment where the documentation suddenly becomes very relevant.

Glad you figured out what cloud actually means before blaming the machine entirely. 😆

Luck getting the project back, into a coherent state. May the git gods be merciful! 🙏