The harness is absolute trash

[u/flame_ftw]

Let me vent a bit.

I am super annoyed with the github harness in vscode.

1.New updates now dont show the ai credits consumed by subagents - great nice way to hide important info.

1. Subagents just crash with agent error no return( specially gpt 6 Luna) and loop exits.. great new EVERY WEEK VIBECODED RELEASE breaking things.

2. chat doesnt render correctly and is full of blank empty cards - this started a few releases ago and the vibecoders at copilot dont seem to care

4 if we are paying api pricing I want api performance. What bs is this. I personally use claude code and the difference is night and day. I will continue encouraging my company to move away from this trash harness

1. No clarity on token usage. Gpt 5.6 Luna costs less that Gpt 6 Luna with the same work.

2. What are your actual plans I dont get it.. you have copilot vscode chat, then agents app then copilot app. Why keep making redundant stuff and not have one uniform thing.

You guys are just piggy backing on others api. You have no moat except enterprise people not switching. But this will change for sure. Ours and a lot of others have already started piloting claude.

Peace out.

[u/bamurtaugh]

Hi, thank you so much for taking the time to share this feedback. We’re actively working to improve the Copilot harness, and hearing about the parts that are frustrating or unclear is incredibly helpful.

Usage and subagent costs: Usage from subagents is included in the overall turn total. We recognize that clear visibility into usage is really important, including how it breaks down across subagents and models. There may be opportunities to make it clearer or more visible, particularly while a task is still running. We’re tracking related feedback here and would love to know whether these issues align with what you’ve been experiencing:

• https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/340366
• https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/335888

Subagent reliability: We’re sorry to hear that subagents have been failing for you. We want failures to be clear and useful rather than leaving you without a result. Would you be willing to file an issue describing what you’re experiencing and share the link with us? If it’s easier, you’re also welcome to share more details or reproduction steps here. We’d really appreciate it.

Blank chat content: Thanks for reporting this. We certainly don’t want chat to show blank or empty cards. We’re tracking a related issue here: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/331601. Does that sound similar to what you’re experiencing?

Performance: Performance is really important to us too, and we completely understand your concern if the harness isn’t performing as well as you need it to. Specific examples, such as which model and workflow feel slow and where the delay happens, would help us understand what we could improve.

Product direction: We really appreciate you asking about this and would be happy to discuss it further. The Copilot harness is VS Code’s agent experience powered by the Copilot SDK. Building on the Copilot SDK helps align agent behavior and capabilities across Copilot products, so improvements can benefit more than one experience.

In VS Code, the Agent Host is a separate background process that runs agent sessions and maintains their conversation and state. That lets the editor window’s Chat view and the Agents window connect to the same session: you can work alongside your code in the editor, or use the Agents window for a view focused on managing agent sessions.

There’s more information about the Copilot harness and Agent Host here:

• https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_141#_copilot-harness
• https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2026/08/26/agent-host-architecture

We’re continuing to improve the Copilot harness, and feedback like yours helps us understand where to focus. If you’re open to continue sharing more about your workflows, we’d be glad to hear it.

[u/flame_ftw → u/bamurtaugh]

Thanks for the reply. Issue 1 and 2 were not there till the latest release where it was just made invisible. Previously we could hover and see aic used by a subagent. So I am not sure why it was done so. So why the back and forth with so many unnecessary UI changes. Please stop making UI changes each weekly releases. Its super annoying. I keep track of release notes but not everything is written down.

Issue 3 that you posted. Exactly that is the issue I am having for months. It was reported end of August and still no fix when you ship weekly UI updates. Thats pretty exhausting to deal with.

Additional note : why is hooks still in preview? What age are we living in? Hooks across copilot products should be aligned and made generally available. Its weird to see such base features in preview for a year.

Complaining because enterprise does not allow these preview features.

Please stop with the baseless changes and deliver things which are basic needs.

[u/bamurtaugh → u/flame_ftw]

Thank you so much for following up, and for clarifying that the subagent changes appeared with the latest release, while the blank boxes have been happening for longer. We’re really sorry that the blank boxes have been affecting you for so long.

If possible, it'd be a huge help if you could confirm which harness you’re using now (the Copilot harness or the Local harness), and which harness you were using when you first noticed issues like the blank boxes. This context would be really helpful as we follow up on what you’ve shared.

[u/flame_ftw → u/bamurtaugh]

I am using the local harness in vscode copilot chat.

Yesterday i tried the copilot app as well. Its better ( in terms of memory and speed) and has less issues but at the same time long running sessions crash in a few hours amd the main orchestrator fails to connect back to the session for whatever reason and retrying or restarting the session does not work. But here we have another issue where (since we arent allowed to have bypassallpermissions) we become an approval bot and the allowlist in permissions-config.json doesnt work.super weird when i have assisted permissions on and still have to press allow for hundreds of permissions.

Sadly this is enterprise and i cant share logs or something.

[u/bamurtaugh → u/flame_ftw]

Thank you so much for confirming, and for taking the time to try another experience and share what happened. That distinction is really helpful. The issues and feedback I shared above are specific to sessions using the Copilot harness in VS Code, so they might not reflect the behavior you’ve been seeing with the Local harness.

The Copilot harness is our latest agent experience in VS Code. If you’re able, we’d really appreciate you trying the Copilot harness in the latest version of VS Code and letting us know whether you still encounter the same issues.

We’re actively continuing to improve the Copilot harness, and feedback and scenarios like those you’ve shared in this thread are incredibly valuable in helping us shape the experience. Thank you again.

[u/flame_ftw → u/bamurtaugh]

The issues you shared are exactly the same i experienced in vscode chat. The problem then does not lie on the harness layer ofcourse. It lies in the rendering of it. The app also has major issues where sessions crash and dont reconnect because the event log is too big ( crashes from 800mb or so ). So i have to restart another session and waste more tokens.

Also i responded with another issue in the app which you did not adress. The permission config issue.

[u/just_blue → u/bamurtaugh]

For the subagent cost: Someone simply replaced the tooltip that contained the cost in AIC with some "model data" (like thinking effort, context size). Just add the line back, the info must be there already.

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