Request for Persistent Chat History in GitHub Copilot Chat

[vedantnavadiya111]

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Dear GitHub Team,

I am a regular user of GitHub Copilot Chat and greatly appreciate its capabilities in assisting with coding and problem-solving. However, I have noticed a significant limitation: the lack of persistent chat history. Currently, all interactions with Copilot Chat are session-based and are lost once the session ends, the browser is refreshed, or after a period of inactivity.

This is a major inconvenience compared to other chatbots and AI assistants, which store conversation history and allow users to revisit previous discussions at any time. The inability to access past interactions makes it difficult to track progress, refer back to previous solutions, or continue long-term projects efficiently.

I strongly request that GitHub introduce a feature to save and persist Copilot Chat history, either locally or within the user's GitHub account. This would greatly enhance productivity, user experience, and the overall value of Copilot Chat.

Thank you for considering this feedback. I believe this improvement would benefit a large portion of the Copilot user community.

Best regards,
Veadnt Navadiya

[github-actions[bot]]

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[SteelRat1962]

I second this and more. I'll be posting my own feedback shortly.

[JordanLevy99]

I tried adding a folder to my workspace and saving that workspace. however, when I open that workspace I lose my chat that was previously working in the same workspace. There should at least be some sort of export/import functionality here

[wkcly]

I've been coding using the Copilot Agent feature in VS Code, but suddenly all the history records are gone. I have no idea why this happened. Is there any way to retrieve them?

[jfullstackdev]

you can simply remain in that session, to have that persistence, it will not be lost

but having only one session that is persistent, is I guess both good and bad,

anytime the AI hallucinates, or quite confused of what it encountered, like a poorly written code, then it will become messy, with that, you don't have the ability to make that bad convo lost in its memory, hence the need for a new session still

VSCode also offers a preconfigured Memory MCP that is just like what you want, accessing data across sessions

just simply install it, it will go back to your VSCode, and just allow it

https://code.visualstudio.com/mcp

[joelwetzel]

I've had pretty good luck adding a /ChatHistory folder to my workspace. I put a note in my copilot-instructions.md that if I ask copilot to archive this chat, it should record the chat into a new markdown file in /ChatHistory. It ends up summarizing a little, but in a good way. I don't seem to lose anything important. There's just less repetition.