VS Code extension: managing multiple chats is unreliable — no conversation list indicators, no archiving

Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Jun 5, 2026 by k421s Closed Jun 9, 2026

Summary

Working with more than one or two conversations at a time in the VS Code (native) extension is very difficult. In practice I end up hopping out to the terminal CLI whenever I need to juggle multiple chats, because the extension doesn't give me a reliable way to keep them straight.

Pain points

  • No clear conversation list / indicators in the side panel. There's no good way to see my open/recent conversations at a glance, so reopening an old one is guesswork and I frequently land in the wrong chat or get them mixed up.
  • Reopening old conversations is unreliable. I can't confidently jump back to a specific prior conversation — there's nothing identifying them (titles, summaries, last-activity, which file/branch they were about, etc.).
  • No way to archive or mark chats as done. When a conversation is finished, it just lingers. There's no archive/close/done action to get it out of the way, so the list (such as it is) only gets noisier over time.

Why it matters

The terminal CLI handles multiple parallel conversations far more comfortably than the extension does today, so multi-chat work pushes me out of the IDE — which defeats a lot of the point of the extension.

Request / ideas

  • A conversation list in the side panel with meaningful labels (auto-titled from the first prompt, or editable), last-activity time, and a clear active-conversation indicator.
  • A reliable way to reopen a specific past conversation without mix-ups.
  • Ability to archive / mark a conversation as done (and ideally filter archived ones out of the main list).

Environment

  • Claude Code VS Code extension
  • macOS

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