chat sessions are gone

After a normal VS Code restart, two days’ worth of chat sessions are completely gone. I checked every filter—they weren’t hidden; they were deleted.

This isn’t an isolated issue either. I’ve had this happen several times, along with Copilot dropping file changes even after I click Keep, inconsistent edits when sessions error or retry, repeated parts inside an answer, and other reliability problems.

It’s genuinely frustrating. VS Code Chat still feels like an early beta product, and I’m seriously considering moving to something more reliable.

Version: 1.133.0

**opus findings:**

> Chat history is silently lost when a window transitions between single-folder and multi-root workspace storage. On VS Code 1.133.0 (a5b5009513, macOS arm64), adding a second folder to a single-folder window promotes it to an untitled workspace with a new workspaceStorage hash, and ChatSessionStore logs Workspace transition from to / Copied N chat session files … (originals preserved at old location). The transition copies the chatSessions/*.jsonl transcripts to the new storage folder but does not migrate the chat.ChatSessionStore.index key in state.vscdb. All subsequent sessions are indexed only under the new hash, so the moment you return to the plain folder the chat list is frozen at the timestamp of the transition — in my case it jumped straight from Aug 17 14:02 to Aug 19, hiding 22 sessions (13 of them from a full day's work) even though all 144 .jsonl files were sitting in the folder untouched. The loss is invisible: no error, no warning, and the history simply appears truncated. It is also effectively unrecoverable through the UI, because the untitled workspace's Code/Workspaces//workspace.json had already been cleaned up, leaving its 84-entry index reachable only by opening state.vscdb in sqlite3 by hand. Suggested fix: migrate the index entries alongside the transcript files during a workspace transition (or reconcile the index against the chatSessions/ directory on startup, which would repair the orphaned files automatically).