Agent Panel: New Agent panel breaks multi-tab support and loses context

[taoeffect]

Summary

The latest changes related to adding the coding agent stuff have broken the previously well-behaved tab support for talking to LLMs.

Description

Steps to trigger the problem:

1. Create a new text thread
2. Give the agent some task to work on
3. While it's thinking create a new text thread tab

There are multiple serious problems now:

• The original text conversation that was thinking gets lost. Even using the switcher, it seems impossible to get it back:

• There is no way to quickly switch between conversations and view progress on an ongoing LLM task, not only because it's simply gone completely but also because the UI has removed the tab bar as well. There are no more tabs. 😢

Expected Behavior:

• For an ongoing LLM-thinking plain text thread to not disappear
• For the tabs functionality to be restored

As a side note:

• Ideally (and this might be for a separate feature request), for there to be no fundamental difference between the text-based LLM interaction and the agent-based interaction. It'd be great if they all remained text-based as before, but with added functionality that can be called up on the fly for agent-based behavior (while keeping everything plain-text interactive and viewable) EDIT: opened up a discussion for this: #30187

Zed Version and System Specs

Zed: v0.185.10 (Zed) OS: macOS 14.7.3 Memory: 128 GiB Architecture: aarch64

[danilo-leal]

Hey, thanks for the issue! The problem with the previously ongoing thread going away is definitely something we should look into; it shouldn't happen. But regarding to this not being tab-based exactly like it was before, I'm afraid this is something we won't, at least for now, change, as the navigation pattern for the revamped panel was intentionally designed this way! I do want to add the capacity to navigate through the recently opened entries with the tab switch keybinding, though, which I think will make the interaction much better!

[taoeffect]

I'm afraid this is something we won't, at least for now, change, as the navigation pattern for the revamped panel was intentionally designed this way!

What about the suggestion here?

This would make the agent behavior less of a special case, and therefore would allow the multi-tab UI to remain as it was.

As an alternative, the agent UI could be kept as a unique and separate UI, but then it could be a different view entirely, instead of being half-merged with the previous tab-based UI. This too would allow us to keep the text-based tabs that we had before, and the agent-based UI could be accessed via a separate button on the bottom right.

[taoeffect]

Here's an example use-case where having multiple tabs support really helps: when reviewing PRs, I often like to pass the diff by multiple LLMs to see what they each have to say. This is easily done with multiple tabs, but now works very poorly (actually, not at all due to the bug, but even if that's fixed, still doesn't allow quick comparison between the responses).

[wskel]

I concur with @taoeffect. For an editor that markets itself as enabling "[coding] at the speed of thought", I find this change puzzling. I regularly start multiple threads at once while working, and this change significantly impedes these workflows (without opening multiple instances of Zed).

However, if this is a matter of editor performance, I can understand the necessity to limit open threads. Nevertheless, I am sorely missing the original functionality. I have had this thread bookmarked for the past month with the hope that this change would be reversed.

[github-actions[bot]]

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[taoeffect]

Yes this is still an issue