Copilot sits there showing "Building solution..." when the build has finished

[MrYossu]

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Bug

Copilot Feature Area

Visual Studio

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I ask Copilot to do a task from the chat window within Visual Studio, and it will make a start, then kick off a build.

Often it detects the build completion, and carries on. However, on a fairly regular basis, it sits there, waiting for the build to finish, even though it already has...

If I stop it, and ask it to carry on, sometimes it does, but more often than not, it just does the same thing again.

Anyone any idea why it does this, and what I can do to avoid it? I asked it to do a task earlier, and it's done this about four times so far, as is still doing it. It's made some code changes that don't compile, and isn't doing anything more.

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[terminalskid]

Restart, clear cache and make sure it is setup properly. As I have understood this is pretty commonly occuring to users with Co-Pilot

[MrYossu]

@terminalskid Pardon my ignorance, but restart what, and clear which cache?

As for being set up properly, most of the time it works fine, it's just every now and then that it gets stuck with this issue. I'm not sure what setup I could change.

Sorry if these are dumb questions, but I'm not clear what you meant.
Thanks for the reply.

[terminalskid]

Clear temp files, preload and VS Code cache (https://builtin.com/articles/vs-code-clear-cache) and restart your computer and/or VS

[MrYossu]

Thanks, will give that a go and see if it helps

[MrYossu]

@terminalskid I closed VS, cleared out my Windows temp folder, cleared preload and deleted the VS cache (your instructions were for VS Code, but I did what seemed to be the same thing for VS) and restarted. However it's doing it again.

Thanks for the suggestion. Any other ideas?

[terminalskid]

it seems to be a Copilot Chat issue rather than anything specific to your project.

Copilot in Visual Studio sometimes kicks off or waits for a build, but then fails to detect that the build has actually finished. When that happens, it gets stuck in a “waiting for build to complete” state and never continues, even though the build already succeeded or failed. Stopping it and asking it to continue often just puts it back into the same loop.

A few things that sometimes help as workarounds:

Run the build manually and wait for it to fully complete before asking Copilot to continue.

Avoid prompts like “fix until it builds” or “run the build and fix errors”.

Instead, paste the compiler errors directly into Copilot and ask it to fix them without running or waiting for a build.
otherwise ask like ChatGPT with logs/error messages

If it’s already stuck, explicitly tell it to ignore the previous build and just work from the current code.

This seems to happen more often with larger or multi-project solutions. From what I can tell, it’s a known reliability issue with how Copilot listens for build completion events inside Visual Studio.