VS Code GitHub Copilot “Send and Dispatch” button broken: how to diagnose

If you’re stuck with the GitHub copilot button not working in VS Code and found this article, I hope it will help you narrow down the problem.

I encountered this issue today after writing an extensive prompt. The problem is that the “Send and Dispatch” button in GitHub Copilot Chat extension appears to do no action, regardless how many times you click 😉

Where to find the error message?

I found out the the error message it displayed in the Output pane in the Window category:

However, depending on the cause, you might want to browse other logs too, in a hope to find the exception:

PS. Why wasn’t it working for this blogpost author?

I apparently found a little bug in the Copilot Chat extension. When pasting text while the cursor is at the beginning of the context reference, something breaks and the prompt cannot be sent.

But this blogpost is more about “where to look for error message” than “why this specific button doesn’t work?”. Hope it helps someone 😊