How would you want last session and selected agent/model/mode to be persisted?

[RomneyDa]

@ferenci84 opened #7617 which adds per-tab selected mode/model persistence. I think per-session would be a great improvement. PR was closed only because implementation was tabs-only and would conflict with a per-session implementation which I think is worthwhile. I wanted to get a feel for other people's thoughts on how they'd want model, mode, and agent selection to work between sessions, windows, workspaces, accounts, orgs, and IDEs.

I generally agree with @ferenci84 that both selected model and mode should be persisted per session, across workspaces/IDEs/accounts etc if available, mostly because the chat history is especially model/mode dependent. Also available models are highly agent-dependent, so a per-agent fallback (the current only persistence) makes sense. i.e.

• model per session, fallbacks to per profile, first in list, etc.
• mode per session, fallbacks to last selected mode and default (Agent)

I also think on startup it should only load the last session from that workspace if present. Could see situations where people want sessions spanning workspaces but that seems like the exception.

Would love to hear other people's takes on this.

[ferenci84]

Hi, for simplicity, my use case is:
I'm using two tabs, e.g. Tab1 with Claude Sonnet for a main task (like adding features to the existing code) I'm doing, Tab2 with Qwen3 Coder for general coding questions. When I'm switching tabs, I want the tabs to keep their model settings. I believe this feature has the most value with tabs, since you may switch tabs 100+ times a day (and it's really annoying to have to switch the model every time and to forget to switch every other time), but reload a previously closed session, say, 5 times a day.

For this reason, I believe other people will care once tabs are enabled by default. Also I think, that although it would also be good to have this feature to be application-wide persisting the model per session forever, the 95% of the value is already provided by keeping it tabs-only, while affecting only file. Also, the persistence of model is soft, mathing only the name, and it's lost once the user changes the config. For this reason, I recommend you to reconsider: 1) To make the tabs feature enabled by default 2) Keep it simple and have this feature per tab only unless anyone is annoyed by losing the model for old sessions.

Anyway, if you want me to work on a new PR with full session persistence, let me know.

[ferenci84]

Fortunately GPT-5 was able to do it with issuing only two prompts. Here is the new PR: #8644