Amazon Q - abruptly stops in-progress tasks and starts conversation afresh

This issue you're experiencing with Amazon Q Developer in VS Code is a known limitation. When Amazon Q abruptly stops and clears the conversation history, it's likely hitting one of its service limitations.

There are a few potential approaches to address this:

1. Break down your prompts into smaller, less complex requests. Amazon Q may struggle with very complex or lengthy tasks, causing it to reset.

2. Toggle between agentic coding modes. You can use the "</>" icon at the bottom of the chat panel to switch agentic coding on or off, which might help with certain types of requests.

3. Restructure your prompt with clearer instructions and more context to help Amazon Q better understand what you're asking.

4. Be aware that Amazon Q Developer currently does not have built-in functionality to save chat history in VS Code. When the IDE is closed, conversations are not persisted by default.

If you're working on something important, consider manually copying the conversation to a text file to preserve it, as Amazon Q Developer in VS Code doesn't currently maintain persistent chat history across sessions.
Sources
Is there a persistent feature in Amazon Q developer? | AWS re:Post
Amazon Q - I'm sorry, I am unable to respond further. Perhaps we could find another topic to discuss? | AWS re:Post
Chatting with Amazon Q Developer about code - Amazon Q Developer

The AWS team is aware of the 'An unexpected error occurred, please retry' message that some users are experiencing due to high demand following recent Kiro launch - while the team works on stabilizing the service and provisioning additional capacity, you can try waiting a moment and retrying your request, or alternatively switch to using the Claude Sonnet 3.5 model since the 3.5 model is not used with Kiro (note that this issue may temporarily affect the Amazon Q plugin, Q CLI and other Q-powered tools as they share the same backend).