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agent_ui: Display an activity bar for subagents waiting for permission#52460

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danilo-leal merged 2 commits intomainfrom
waiting-permision-subagents
Mar 26, 2026
Merged

agent_ui: Display an activity bar for subagents waiting for permission#52460
danilo-leal merged 2 commits intomainfrom
waiting-permision-subagents

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@danilo-leal
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Closes #52346

Given the parallel nature of subagents calls, it's possible that there is a subagent way out of view that's waiting for the user to give permissions. Right now, it's kind of hard to know this and you may think something wrong is happening given the thread generation isn't making any progress.

This PR adds an "activity bar" to the thread view that displays subagents on a "waiting for confirmation" status. We display the subagent's summary label as well as allow clicking on it to quickly scrolling to that subagent.

Screenshot 2026-03-25 at 10  09@2x

Release Notes:

  • Agent: Improved the experience of interacting with subagents waiting for confirmation.

@cla-bot cla-bot bot added the cla-signed The user has signed the Contributor License Agreement label Mar 26, 2026
@zed-codeowner-coordinator zed-codeowner-coordinator bot requested review from a team, mikayla-maki and osyvokon and removed request for a team March 26, 2026 01:10
@zed-community-bot zed-community-bot bot added the staff Pull requests authored by a current member of Zed staff label Mar 26, 2026
@danilo-leal danilo-leal assigned benbrandt and unassigned osyvokon Mar 26, 2026
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Any chance we can make this generic to any tool call that might be pending and scroll to it?

@danilo-leal
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I was under the assumption that any other tool requesting permission would "pause" the thread and be stuck at the bottom of the view, never going out of view, because no other content can be generated after it while pending... right Subagents has this as an fundamental difference, no? Will merge this now, but happy to chat about it/explore more if I'm off!

@danilo-leal danilo-leal merged commit d3f5fc8 into main Mar 26, 2026
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@danilo-leal danilo-leal deleted the waiting-permision-subagents branch March 26, 2026 21:23
@wilfredor
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This is also related to the excessive permission requests required to use Copilot. There are tasks it won’t perform while in Autopilot mode, so we’re forced to switch it to agent mode and stay glued to the computer, constantly clicking “yes” the whole time.

@danilo-leal
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Alrighty, nevermind, I was operating with the thought that we didn't support parallel tool calls aside from subagents but we definitely do, so we can totally expand this outside of the subagent scope. I'll work on a follow-up, thanks both for the heads-up! 👍

@wilfredor
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Maybe you could group repetitive permission requests into a single confirmation per task or session, instead of constantly asking “yes.”

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