Persistent Chats with Pieces Copilot: Pieces for Obsidian 1.6.0 & Pieces for VS Code 1.8.0

Hello Pieces Devs! Today we are excited to announce the latest release of the Obsidian and VS Code plugins. This is our biggest release since Pieces Copilot, and largely revolves around a highly requested feature for our copilots: persistent chats. That’s right, with this feature, you can now revisit any previous conversation you've had with the Pieces Copilot. This means your interactions with the copilot are no longer ephemeral but can be referenced and built upon over time.

But, that’s not all! You can now also add snippets as context in both the VS Code and Obsidian plugins. We have also made significant changes to the context selector, which simplifies the experience. Let’s dive deeper into these updates.

Introducing Persistent Chats

Pieces Copilot just keeps getting more helpful and more closely integrated with your workflow. Today, you can save copilot conversations for later with persistent chats in our Pieces for Obsidian and VS Code Plugins.

This new feature enables you to revisit any past conversation with the Pieces Copilot, which means that your interactions with the copilot can be referenced and built upon over time. A key aspect of this update is the persistence of a conversation’s context. If you set the context for a conversation and return to it later, it will retain the same files and snippets you initially configured. Moreover, we've extended the ability to add snippets as context to both the VS Code and Obsidian plugins. This feature, already available in the Pieces for Developers Desktop App, was a logical addition to this release.

Updated Ways to Chat with Pieces Copilot:

• To view your list of conversations, click on the ‘open left panel’ icon that is at the top left of the copilot view
• You can edit the name of a conversation or delete it by clicking on the corresponding edit or delete icons
• To create a new conversation, either start chatting with the copilot while no conversation is selected or click ‘New Chat’ to start an empty conversation.
• The context selector button has been moved from the top right to the bottom right corner of the view
• In order to select the LLM runtime you would like to use, click on the ‘selected model’ box at the top right of the copilot view or the bottom left of the conversation list
• There’s a new quick action in the empty copilot view to select a conversation

Major Overhaul of the Context Selector

We've simplified the context selector’s design, opting for the native file picker instead of recreating the user's workspace file tree. This change offers a more intuitive and familiar experience when using the context selector, akin to what is seen in the Pieces for Developers Desktop App.

Improvements to Conversation Context in the Pieces for VS Code Extension

Last but not least, there are a few new features surrounding adding context to copilot conversations. While users have had the ability to control their context for weeks, we've made it more user-friendly. You can now right-click on any file, folder, or snippet in your snippet tree and add it to your current Pieces Copilot conversation’s context, thus giving you another convenient way to configure the copilot’s context.

Always Striving for the Best Developer Experience

The development process for our TypeScript plugins (Pieces for JupyterLab, Pieces for Obsidian, and Pieces for VS Code) has, until now, been somewhat repetitive. The Pieces development team found ourselves rewriting the same features across these three plugins, which contradicted the principles of reusability that are crucial for an efficient development experience.

To address this, we've taken a significant step forward by creating a shared Pieces Copilot dependency for all of our TypeScript plugins. This change greatly accelerates the development of Pieces Copilot integrations, enabling each plugin to consistently deliver the same experience across multiple environments.

This eliminates the need to implement, debug, and style the same features thrice. As a result, the copilots in Pieces for Obsidian, Pieces for VS Code, Pieces for JupyterLab, and any future Pieces integrations that use this package will be able to evolve more rapidly and provide a more unified user experience. This update has been released in Pieces for Obsidian and will be rolled out to the other integrations soon.

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Support

As always, if you run into issues or have feedback, please fill out this quick form or email us at support@pieces.app and we’ll be in touch as soon as possible!