github / github/copilot-cli

Session and prompt lost when stopping an action or hitting the stop button

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area:sessions
Dominant language
Shell
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Description

Bug Report

Description

When a user stops an in-progress action (e.g., hits the stop button during agent execution), the entire session — including the original prompt and any edits made to it — is deleted. This has happened multiple times.

Steps to Reproduce
  1. Create a new session with a detailed prompt
  2. The agent begins executing
  3. Hit the "stop" button to cancel the action
  4. The session disappears entirely — prompt, conversation history, and session are gone
Expected Behavior

Stopping an action should halt execution but preserve the session, the original prompt, and any conversation history up to that point. The user should be able to resume or re-run from that state.

Actual Behavior

The entire session is deleted, including the user's original prompt and any iterative edits they made to it. There is no way to recover the work.

Impact
  • Loss of detailed, carefully crafted prompts that took time to write and iterate on
  • User has to recreate the prompt from memory, losing edits made in the previous session
  • Erodes trust in the tool for complex, multi-turn prompt development
Additional Context
  • Reported by a user in the github/lifecyclemarketing project
  • Has occurred multiple times (not a one-off)
  • The lost session involved a complex weekly digest workflow prompt that had been edited several times before the stop action was triggered

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Reproduce the issue by creating a session with an edited prompt, starting an action, and pressing the stop button. Trace the stop/cancellation path to identify where session deletion occurs; done means execution stops while the prompt, edits, conversation history, and session remain available for resuming or rerunning.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
shell
Domain
cli
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
55/100

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