GitHub Copilot August 3: /btw, /worktree, and /rewind Without Git

GitHub Copilot’s August 3 weekly releases — detailed in the official changelog on August 7 — deliver five features that, taken together, dismantle the one-task-at-a-time assumption that has defined agent sessions since day one. Side chats that don’t interrupt your running agent, isolated worktrees per session, keyboard-driven session management, a /rewind

command that finally works outside git repositories, and live tool-call timing in the timeline. None of these would be headline news on its own. Together, they describe a tool actively becoming an agent orchestrator.

Ask Without Stopping: /btw #

The most immediately useful feature in this release is /btw

. Type it, ask a question, and Copilot opens a side chat — without pausing whatever the agent is currently doing. The side chat shares the context and prompt cache from your primary conversation, so you don’t pay the cost of re-explaining your codebase. The agent gets your answer using cached tokens; it costs less and returns faster than opening a new chat from scratch.

The practical value is obvious once you’ve been burned by the alternative. You ask Copilot to refactor a module. Midway through, you want to know whether a pattern it’s using is compatible with your current Node version. Without /btw

, you stop the agent, ask, re-establish context, restart. With /btw

: ask the question, get the answer, the agent keeps refactoring. You can also select text from a response and ask a contextual follow-up directly from the selection. This is the feature most developers will reach for by end of week.

Agent Isolation: /worktree #

The experimental /worktree

command creates an isolated git worktree for a new agent session. When you run a long-horizon task — write tests, refactor a module, add a feature — the agent operates on its own branch copy, completely separate from your main working directory. Your files stay clean. You review the agent’s output when it’s done and decide what to keep. The Agents window (public preview) also exposes this as a “New Worktree” option when you start any session from the redesigned panel.

Two caveats worth knowing before you try it. First, worktree mode automatically enables Bypass Approvals — every tool call is auto-approved without confirmation dialogs — and this cannot be changed. That’s a deliberate trade-off (the agent is isolated anyway), but enterprise teams with policy requirements should be aware of it. Second, there is a known bug where worktree creation fails silently when the repository is in detached HEAD state. The feature requires a Git repository with at least one commit.

/rewind Without a Git Repository #

The original /rewind

was essentially a git-only feature, which made it nearly useless for the scripts, config files, and scratch-directory work that consumes a meaningful portion of most developers time. The August 3 update removes that constraint. /rewind

now works anywhere — with or without version control.

The restore options are: conversation only, or conversation plus the files Copilot changed. The command is careful about scope: it skips any file whose contents no longer match what Copilot last wrote. If you edited a file after Copilot touched it, /rewind

will not overwrite your work. Only Copilot’s unmodified changes are rolled back. This makes it safer than a blanket undo, but you need to understand the skipping behavior before relying on it as a full recovery mechanism. Full details are in the GitHub Copilot roll-back docs.

Sessions Sidebar and Live Durations #

The Sessions sidebar surfaces multiple concurrent sessions in a dedicated panel: click the left arrow to open it, use n

to open a new session, x

to close the current one, and arrow keys to navigate. A single agent session can also hold multiple related chats — each with its own history, title, and model — instead of the single linear thread you’ve been working with. For developers running several parallel tasks, this replaces what was a genuinely awkward context-switching experience with something keyboard-native.

Live tool-call durations are the smallest feature in this release and probably the one you’ll appreciate most during a stuck session. Timeline headers now show a live, ticking counter for any tool call that has run longer than five seconds. It’s on by default; disable it with /settings showToolDurations

. The Copilot CLI v1.0.78, released the same day, adds the same timing display to terminal sessions. When your agent goes quiet for thirty seconds and you can’t tell whether it’s working or hung, this counter makes the difference.

Quick Reference #

What to Do Now #

These features are incremental individually. Read them together against the June 2026 Copilot App GA and July’s multi-chat sessions, and the direction is unambiguous: GitHub is building Copilot into a platform for running many agents in parallel — each isolated, each reversible, each manageable from a single keyboard-driven interface. The August 3 changelog is another step on that path. Update Copilot, enable the experimental features in your settings, and try /btw

today. That one will save you time before you finish reading this.