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Allow subagents.maxConcurrency for BYOK / non usage-based accounts (currently hard-capped at 2)

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#4,940 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
shell
Domain
cli, developer-experience, tooling

Research direction

Look for the subagent concurrency limit logic in the codebase, likely in a settings or configuration module. The issue mentions the setting is ignored for non-usage-based accounts. Start by searching for 'maxConcurrency' and 'subagents' in the source. Check how billing type is determined and where the hard-coded limit of 2 is applied. Testing will require a BYOK setup to verify the change works for non-usage-based accounts.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

area:agents area:configuration area:models
Summary

subagents.maxConcurrency (added in 1.0.66, "Configure subagent concurrency and depth limits in /settings") is ignored unless the account is on usage-based billing. On other accounts the per-session limit is fixed at 2, and the third task call is rejected immediately (no queue).

Environment
  • Copilot runtime 1.0.81 (Windows x64), used through VS Code 1.138 Agent Host
  • Account: Copilot Free
  • Models: BYOK only (custom OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible gateway); no GitHub-hosted models are used
Repro
  1. ~/.copilot/settings.json: "subagents": { "maxConcurrency": 6 }
  2. Restart, open a new session, ask the agent to start 4 task subagents in mode: "background" in the same turn.
  3. Result: 2 accepted, 2 rejected with: 
    Maximum concurrent agent limit of 2 reached. Wait for existing agents to complete before spawning new ones.
    telemetry: limit_type=concurrent, limit_value=2, current_value=2, execution_mode=background

The schema explains it: maxConcurrency — "Maximum number of subagents that can run concurrently; applies to usage-based billing users only".

Request
  • Let subagents.maxConcurrency apply when the subagents run on BYOK models, since those requests are not billed by GitHub; or
  • document which plans get which default, and whether upgrading (e.g. Copilot Pro) unlocks the setting.
Why it matters

Orchestrator + worker patterns (one session plans, several cheap subagents execute) are the recommended way to control cost with BYOK. A fixed cap of 2 per session forces either serialization or several parallel chat sessions for the same task.

Related: microsoft/vscode#336440 (asks for the same knob on the VS Code side).

Dominant language
Shell
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