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feat: add sidekick - parallel chat companion for active sessions #20713
When working with opencode on long-running agent tasks, users have no way to discuss or review the agent's progress in real-time. They must wait for the task to complete before they can comment, ask questions, or course-correct. This creates a frustrating idle period during complex operations.
Describe the solution you'd like
A Sidekick feature: a lightweight, parallel chat-only conversation that runs alongside the main session. The sidekick:
Reads the parent session's messages in real-time (snapshot at prompt time)
Has its own independent context window (no shared context pollution)
Cannot execute any tools (chat-only companion)
Allows users to inject sidekick conclusions back into the parent session's context
Appears as a sidebar tab in the TUI (no layout changes needed)
This gives users a "waiting room" experience where they can monitor, discuss, or simply chat while the main agent works.
Describe alternatives you've considered
Separate terminal session: Users could open a second opencode instance, but it wouldn't have access to the main session's context.
In-session comments: Adding comments to the main session would pollute the agent's context window and potentially confuse the model.
Read-only viewer: A viewer without chat capability, but this doesn't allow users to discuss or annotate progress.
Additional context
Implementation is ready as a PR. The sidekick is modeled as a child session with kind: "sidekick" and parentID pointing to the main session, with comprehensive route guards, tool blocking, and TUI integration.
Activity
github-actions commentedon Apr 2, 2026
This issue doesn't fully meet our contributing guidelines.
What needs to be fixed:
[FEATURE]:(e.g.,[FEATURE]: add sidekick - parallel chat companion for active sessions)Please edit this issue to address the above within 2 hours, or it will be automatically closed.
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github-actions commentedon Apr 2, 2026
This issue has been automatically closed because it was not updated to meet our contributing guidelines within the 2-hour window.
Feel free to open a new issue that follows our issue templates.