When steering copilot it looses the actual task to perform

[laeubi]

Describe the bug

When copilot is doing some work and one steers it inside the session I noticed since a while it is loosing completely the actual task and skip over important things.

The result is that then copilot goes in a completely different direction, forgetting the actual task (e.g. fixing a bug) and the summary then has nothing to do with the actual request (and is not solved)!

So it somehow feels that steering is broken and instead copilot just interpret this as a complete new request!

Affected version

No response

Steps to reproduce the behavior

No response

Expected behavior

No response

Additional context

No response

[UrosINSSIO]

I can confirm similar behavior when Agents need to use a skill as part of multistep process - the remaining steps after the skill invocation would be skipped. (note: these steps are never skipped when running from VS Code mode)

[laeubi]

Additionally it happens that if copilot uses a codereview that the summary then contains some strange

Fixed XYZ from code review

instead of summarize the actual changes...

[strue36]

Yes I see this a lot when using the agent to review a PR. Sometimes it fails to check out the relevant branch. If I use a steering message to tell it to switch branches (especially if working tree is dirty) it will switch branches and then end the turn with something like "If you want, I can fast-forward it next with git pull --ff-only and then continue the review from there."

Obviously I want it to continue, the task was actually to review the code, not switch branches.

[katsar0v]

+1 I can confirm this bug exists. I think you should have a look at how claude code/gemini cli/opencode do steering, they do not have this problem.

[laeubi]

I noticed something similar happens when there is a "Transient API failure" sometimes as well.