Jan 2026: slow start-stop cycles kill achieving any potential (work)flow with Copilot Agent in GitHub webapp?

[lkraav]

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In early 2026, I'm wondering about the subpar UX of Copilot web coding agent .

It takes something like 90+ sec minimum for it to spin up its environment, and if it shuts down before you manage to complete typing to send steering instructions, you now have to wait through another cold boot. Repeat 10-20 times in a session, yeah no thanks.

This stop-n-go nature, with such stark contrast to always-on local IDE-based agent use, pushes this current web-app solution iteration to untolerable territory.

I like that in GH webapp Copilot session is available to the whole team, so anyone can go in, investigate details or learn things, and move things along towards PR completion in a shared fashion.

But in reality, in early 2026, it seems only to be good enough to

• human files initial issue, assigns to
• comes up with an initial solution PR
• someone finishes it up locally, avoiding stop-n-go work pattern, but also somewhat losing some of solution transparency compare to if it all would've been worked through in the open session

Am I missing something important on how to use Copilot Coding Agent in GH webapp?

Tried search for existing discussions with something like https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/categories/copilot-conversations?discussions_q=category%3A%22Copilot+Conversations%22+spinning+sort%3Adate_created but AFAICT, this hasn't been discussed here. I can open a full new topic if so directed.

(Also unclear if this post's "Feature Area" should be "Copilot in GitHub", or "Copilot Coding Agent". Feels like both?)

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