MoonlightCode Agentic Support

The plan gate and held approvals — answering a session that has stopped at the gate.

A session proposing a plan, or attempting a danger-zone action, holds waiting for a human answer. Until this extension existed, VSCode had no surface for either: the only way to answer a hold was to open a different application.

The stakes are higher than a missing feature usually implies. The session is stopped for as long as the hold is open — a bounded hold with no answer resolves to a deny by design, and an unbounded one (what the daemon uses when a client is expected) waits forever. Both look to an operator like an agent that mysteriously stopped working.

Plan review

A webview, because the comments are anchored: the plan is split into sections by its markdown headings, each takes a comment, and the agent is told which section each note is about. Four verdicts, all of which carry the comments — they differ in what the agent is asked to do with them:

• Approve — notes ride along as things to honour while working.
• Open question — answer these before the plan can be judged.
• Refine — the approach is right, the detail is not.
• No-go — the approach itself is wrong; think again.

Approving is deliberately two calls: releasing the held hook, then advancing the phase. Neither implies the other, and sending one alone produces an approval that appears to do nothing.

Verdict buttons are live only while a hold is outstanding. A plan on screen is not evidence that anything is waiting: PlanProposed also fires from transcript detection, for sessions that finished hours ago. Only an approval request arms a verdict.

Held actions

A danger-zone or MCP-authorize hold is one question, so it is answered inline. A refusal asks for a reason first — that reason is returned to the agent as the hook's deny message, and is the only thing it learns from being refused.

Dismissing the notification is not an answer: the hold stays open, and MoonlightCode: Answer a Held Action reopens it.

Missing an event is survivable

The gate state comes from core, which holds the single event-stream connection. A hold is announced once, so a window opened or reloaded mid-hold would otherwise never learn about it — core seeds and re-reads from /control/pending-approvals on activation and after any stream desync.