Vibe Coding
Pattern: Every Coding Agent Shipped Side Conversations This Month
Three vendors independently converged on the same UI primitive within weeks: Cursor 3.11 added side chats openable with `/side` or `/btw` so you can ask a question without derailing the main agent thread, Codex CLI 0.146.0 added named sessions, thread pinning, and switching between side conversations without closing them, and the July VS Code Copilot release let a single agent session hold multiple chats each with its own history, title, and model plus peer-chat forking. The shared insight is that a long agent run has a single expensive context you do not want to pollute with clarifying questions. If you are building agent tooling, the branch-without-losing-the-trunk affordance is now table stakes.
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