formulahendry / formulahendry/vscode-acp

Feature request: support steering and interrupting active chat/actions mid-run

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Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
378
Forks
76
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

## Feature request

Please add better controls for **steering** and **interrupting** an active chat / action while the agent is working.

## Problem

During longer agent runs, I sometimes want to:
- stop the current direction
- steer the agent toward a different approach
- interrupt an action before it finishes
- inject a correction or constraint without waiting for the whole turn to end

Right now this feels too rigid. Once the run is underway, it is hard to intervene in a smooth way.

## What I want

A better mid-run control model, for example:
- interrupt the current run/action cleanly
- send a steering message / correction while the session is still active
- pause / resume if appropriate
- keep the workflow context while changing direction

## Why this matters

For real coding workflows, steering is often necessary when:
- the agent misunderstood the task
- a new constraint appears
- I want to redirect effort before more time/tokens are spent
- I can already see the action is going the wrong way

## Suggested UX directions

Possible implementations:
- a visible `Interrupt` / `Steer` control while a run is active
- allow an inline follow-up instruction that becomes a higher-priority steering message
- support a distinction between:
- hard cancel
- soft steer / redirect
- preserve visible context so the conversation does not feel reset after intervention

## Scope

This request is specifically about **live intervention during active work**, not only cancelling after the fact.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Research direction

No files, tests, or entry points are named. Start by locating the active chat/action lifecycle and any existing cancellation handling, then determine where live controls and steering messages would fit. Done means supporting clean interruption, mid-run steering, and preserved workflow context as described, with behavior for hard cancel versus soft redirect defined.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
typescript, vscode
Domain
developer-experience, tooling
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
30/100

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