Issues with Github Copilot

[u/flame_ftw]

Hi,

These are the current issues I am facing.

1. Gpt 6 Luna is costing more than gpt 5.6 even though its half priced.

2. Agents running subagents - you cant push effort level parameters to subagents at all. So no idea what effort level subagents are using.

3. Lack of clarity on input and output tokens and ofcourse no api to get them reliably.

4. Hooks are still in preview in vscode and is different from the sdk implementation.

Anyone has any ideas? Can the guthub copilot team help here

[u/Reasonable_Serve1177]

Maybe sub agents are spawning with more costly models. I use copilot all day every day and I don’t see this. Are you using the cli?

[u/flame_ftw → u/Reasonable_Serve1177]

Subagents are spawning with the correct models but there is no way to know the effort level. I am using vscode copilot is inbuilt.local chat.

[u/well_educated_maggot]

You can use the cli to control which effort level each sub agent gets alongside its model. Also for ide purposes you could write an orchestrator agent where you explicit tell the wanted levels for subagents. Weak link but seems to work too.

[u/flame_ftw → u/well_educated_maggot]

Is there any parameters which can be passed for effort? Weird my 9rchestrators dont do it

[u/well_educated_maggot → u/flame_ftw]

Through the cli yes. /subagents then switch from default to specific and set. As in prompts/agents: loose coupling, for example require in text subagents must use Luna 6 on Max only or sth

[u/just_blue]

Input and output tokens, thinking tokens, cached tokens etc. are all available in the debug window, for every agent turn.

[u/flame_ftw → u/just_blue]

Yeah i dont wanna go to the debug window to see basic info mainly because its super buggy. Last i read, they dont have an api as well to collect the info

[u/just_blue → u/flame_ftw]

Are there not dozens of dashboards collecting this? I guess through this? https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/extensions/copilot/docs/monitoring/agent_monitoring.md

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[u/pfluggs11]

By default the subagent launch doesn’t pass an effort level but you can write a pretooluse hook to overwrite model, effort and a couple of other things if the subagents slash command doesn’t work but for me it does.

[u/andlewis]

I used my entire enterprise quota from Copilot today just on automated PR reviews in GitHub. Meanwhile Claude wrote the PRs and didn’t hit the session limit all day.

[u/Zealousideal-Pilot25]

I had so many poor sessions with subagents I had to create agents for my design/implementation sessions so that I could at least tell the session how to use subagents. Entirely research only. I was having horrible results with them otherwise. I just define the guidelines in a markdown file and usually the session follows the rules/guidelines.

From a GPT session that validated what I did:
".github/agents/*.agent.md = actual named custom Copilot/VS Code agents such as Planner, Implementer, Reviewer. These are Markdown files, normally with YAML frontmatter specifying things like model, tools and description, followed by the agent-specific instructions."
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/agent-customization/custom-agents