In my earlier posts about the GitHub Copilot CLI, I already introduced the /compact command, a slash command that summarizes your conversation history to free up context space, letting you keep working in the same session without losing momentum. Well, good news! It's no longer CLI-only.
The February 2026 release of VS Code brings /compact directly into the editor, and it's part of a much broader story about making agents actually usable for the kind of long, messy, real-world tasks developers deal with every day.
The Context Window problem
Here's what happens without context compaction: you start an agent session, ask it to dig into a complex feature, go back and forth a few times, and eventually the conversation grows so large that the model starts losing the thread, or the session simply stops. You're forced to start over, re-explain everything, and lose all the accumulated understanding the agent had built up.
Context compaction solves this by summarizing older parts of the conversation into a compact form, preserving what matters while freeing up space for what comes next. VS Code already supported automatic compaction that kicks in when the context window approaches its limit.
But the February release added support for manual compaction: you can now type /compact whenever you want to proactively clean things up — before the window fills, before switching focus, or before handing a session off to a cloud agent. Manual compaction is available for local, background, and Claude agent sessions.
You can view what is already in the context by hovering over the context window control:
Pro tip: When executing the compaction, you can give the agent hints on what to keep and what to throw away.
Agents trustworthiness
Long-running development tasks — the kind that span hours, involve multiple files, and require back-and-forth — are exactly where agents historically fall apart. Context limits, loss of state, and brittle session management all make it hard to trust an agent with anything that isn't a short, self-contained task.
Manual /compact, session memory, steering mid-flight, and persistent plans are all targeted at this exact problem. They don't make agents perfect, but they make them significantly more trustworthy for the work that actually takes time.
If you've been skeptical about agents for anything beyond quick one-shot tasks, the 1.110 release is worth revisiting. The /compact command in VS Code is a small addition, but it signals something larger: a serious effort to make agentic development practical for real codebases and real workflows.
More information
GitHub Copilot CLI Tips & Tricks — Part 2: Session management