Troubleshooting Previous Chat Sessions

Overview

The Troubleshoot Previous Chat Sessions, shows you how to analyze and resolve issues from past conversations without recreating them. By using the /troubleshoot command together with the session picker, you can reference earlier sessions and investigate unexpected behavior such as custom instructions, agent skills, prompts, and hooks being ignored, delayed responses, or tools not being triggered correctly.

This tutorial will guide you through the process of opening past sessions, diagnosing problems, and applying fixes so you can improve the reliability and performance of future chat interactions.

What You Will Learn

By completing this tutorial, you will be able to:

• Access and reference previous chat sessions using the /troubleshoot command

• Analyze agent debug logs to identify issues with:

  • Custom instructions, agent skills, prompts, and hooks are ignored or not applied
  • Slow response times and performance
  • Tools not being invoked as expected and interpret debug log information to diagnose common chat issues
  • Attach sessions as context using the Add Context menu

Steps to Troubleshoot Previous Sessions

Step 1: Enable Debug Logging

• Open the Settings (Ctrl+, / Cmd+,)

• Search for syncfusion.codestudio.chat.agentDebugLog.fileLogging.enabled

• Toggle the setting to On for persistent file logging

  

This ensures that detailed debug information is captured for future troubleshooting sessions.

Step 2: Use the /troubleshoot Command

• Open the Chat view in BoldCreate. This will be your current troubleshooting session where you’ll diagnose past issues

• In the chat input field, type: /troubleshoot command is recognized

Step 3: Reference a Previous Session - Using the Session Picker

• After typing /troubleshoot, include #session in your prompt:

  /troubleshoot why were custom instructions ignored in this #session:

• A session picker dialog will appear showing your previous chat sessions Browse through the list of sessions and select the one you want to investigate

• The selected session will be attached to your current troubleshooting query

Step 4: Analyze the Troubleshooting Results

Once you submit your troubleshooting query, BoldCreate will analyze the debug logs from the selected session and provide insights such as:

• Custom Instructions: Whether they were loaded and applied correctly

• Tool Invocations: Which tools were called and their execution status

• Response Times: Performance metrics and bottleneck identification

• Agent Reasoning: Step-by-step breakdown of agent decisions

• Error Logs: Any errors or warnings encountered during execution

  

These insights are generated from debug logs—detailed JSONL records stored in your system that capture every event during your chat session.

Step 5: Review the analysis

The troubleshoot skill will parse agent debug logs and return insights which tool calls ran, where custom instructions were ignored, or latency sources. Use these insights to adjust settings or reproduce the issue if needed.

What’s Next

After troubleshooting a previous session, consider these next steps:

• Apply fixes the troubleshoot report recommends (update custom instructions, tool approvals, or agent settings), then run /troubleshoot session again to confirm the problem is resolved.

• Regularly review chat logs for performance patterns. Update your chat configuration based on troubleshooting insights