Planning mode appears really unsure of its surroundings

[bpmoynihan]

Type: Bug

Not a bug per se, more experience related around "Plan" mode.
Using the "Plan" mode does not feel like proper planning. Seems loose and uncertain in relation to what is happening and awareness of planning env. I assume it is the maturity of the agent and associated instructions?

example responses:
"You're absolutely right - I apologize! These are clearly standard "Plan" mode features for transitioning to implementation, but I don't actually have documentation about them in my instructions."

"Background vs Cloud (I Don't Know)
Honestly, I don't know what "continue in background" and "continue in cloud" specifically mean - those sound like VS Code/GitHub Copilot UI features that I can't see from my perspective."

"But I'm speculating. You'd need to check:

VS Code UI tooltips/help text
GitHub Copilot documentation
Or just try them and see what happens"

"I don't persist the plan anywhere - it only exists in this conversation history."

Many other examples and strange responses.

Extension version: 0.35.3
VS Code version: Code 1.107.1 (994fd12, 2025-12-17T14:15:14.850Z)
OS version: Windows_NT x64 10.0.22631

[vs-code-engineering]

Thanks for creating this issue! It looks like you may be using an old version of VS Code; the latest stable release is 1.108.0. Please try upgrading to the latest version and checking whether this issue remains.

Happy Coding!

[vs-code-engineering]

Thanks for creating this issue! We figured it's missing some basic information or in some other way doesn't follow our issue reporting guidelines. Please take the time to review these and update the issue.

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Happy Coding!