Improve delegation between foreground/background/cloud agents

[rebornix]

Now we have delegation from local foreground chat to cloud agent (CCA powered) and background agent (Copilot CLI powered), and delegation from background agent to cloud agent, the experience right now is a bit inconsistent and unintuitive to use, thus this month we will improve the delegation experience in overall, including but not limited to:

• Improve the delegate button (icon, quick pick, tooltip, enablement)
• Support referencing source agent session in target agent session
• Support proper agent session replacement/archiving after delegation

[bpasero]

A first glimpse of the new UI is ready in insiders to be tested:

Code lives here:

vscode/src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/actions/chatContinueInAction.ts

Line 43 in 64705b3

export class ContinueChatInSessionAction extends Action2 {

[gayanper]

This is nice feature, I gave it a try on Insiders, it seems the delegated background task is not started with the current workspace dir as it's working directory, So it spends some time to figure out that by listing user home directory which cause lot if access control triggers in operating systems like MacOS for example.

[bpasero]

@gayanper thanks for trying, I think we still miss a lot of work on the background target to work well and be on par with the cloud one, we will try to enable selfhosting for background asap 🙏

[gayanper]

On a side note have you considered tweaking the copilot cli SDK library which is packaged inside vscode extension to use a standard protocol like ACP, may be missing stuff for vscode can be added like in LSP custom messages if needed. That way the this delegation work could work with other agent CLIs as well making vscode more opensource AI editor. This just food food for thought, the current work you are doing is very useful and I will keep on trying out them.

[bpasero]

☝️ I let @rebornix or @DonJayamanne chime in who implement this support

[rebornix]

@gayanper acp or similar protocols are being discussed and currently we are working on the overall UI/UX for background agent and how to translate that to API needs. Once we sort this out, allowing users to use their preferred CLI is a great next step.