If you type text in the chat and then select New Agent it will delete all the text that you just typed in. This behavior is not consistent, I 'm pretty sure that previously or perhaps in the tab view that a new agent opens up a new blank tab as expected without deleting your previous unsubmitted work. Obviously if you submit a chat then the chat is saved. Previously when you clicked on new agent it opened up a new “tab” or placed a new agent in the agent list on the left hand side depending on which workspace you are using. Now it simply deletes everything you wrote. Its really amazing sometime how fast agents are, unfortunately for us “meat puppets” (check out william gibson if you are missing that reference) or humans it still takes time to write quality prompts and give guidance to the AI. Losing 45 minutes of work when typing a detailed prompt to give step by step guidance to the ai is frustrating. It takes work to tame and guide this beast.
The irony of the wonderful world of computers, we are in the glorious days of an AI revolution and will still have the age old WTF happened to all the work I just did, “poof” its disappeared into cyber space problem:)
Steps to Reproduce
Click on new agent in the new agent view
Expected Behavior
A new chat window should be created instead of clearing the current chat window and delteing all the text you wrote.
Hey, thanks for the report. I understand the frustration - losing 45 minutes of work on a prompt is really painful.
In the meantime, try:
Ctrl+N - creates a new chat while keeping the text in the current one
Avoid using the “New Agent” button if you have unsaved text - it creates a new tab, overwriting the current one
Copy long prompts before taking any actions (Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C)
This is known behavior - the team is considering improvements. Previously, a new tab would open without overwriting, but now the “New Agent” button works as “new chat” instead of “new tab.”
I think the default behavior should be to open a new tab. I’m not sure why one would want a clear chat button. Its easy enough to just crt + a and delete. When you are working it easy to press this accidentally and then wonder what happened to that chat?
I just ran into this for the second time this week and finally tracked down this comment.
+1 to @benjaminfortunato’s comment. No human or bot is ever going to read the “New Agent” button which sits right on top of a stack of agent tabs and understand that this button means “wipe the entire chat history for the current chat with no confirm modal and start it over with a clean slate”. The labels “Clear Agent” or “Wipe Agent” or “Delete Agent” all come to mind for that sort of behavior, but even those should have a confirm modal before destroying data. And in the context of a stack of agents, the “New Agent” button is absolutely going to be understood by the vast majority of users to mean “I’d like a new one of the thing that this button is sitting on top of, thank you very much”.
Between the completely illogical design, the fact that it used to work the way everyone would expect, and the fact that Ctrl+N (which usually stands for “New”) does exactly what users would expect: I honestly have a very hard time believing that this was a flawed design decision rather than a clear bug with a clear and obvious resolution that doesn’t need to be “considered” so much as just implemented.
EDIT: To be clear, what I experience in 2.1.42 is a bit more egregious than what is described above. For me, the “New Agent” button will delete a chat even after an agent has replied. Twice this week I’ve seen multiple turns of chat history erased.
Maybe this is a separate issue? It has the same workaround, though: Ctrl+N works as I’d expect it to.
