Microsoft Frees the VS Code GitHub Copilot Chat Extension As It Moves to Build an "AI Editor"

Microsoft's team behind the Visual Studio Code (VS Code) integrated development environment (IDE) has announced that the project has reached its first milestone in becoming an open source artificial intelligence-first development platform: the release of the source code for the GitHub Copilot Chat extension.

"As we outlined previously, our primary motivation is community-driven innovation and increasing data transparency," the VS Code team explains. "We believe AI experiences can thrive by leveraging the vibrant open-source community — just as VS Code has successfully done over the past decade. As AI is becoming an integral part of the modern coding experience, it should be developed openly alongside VS Code itself."

Interest in using "AI assistants" to assist with — or, in the case of the "vibe coding" hype train, take over — coding projects has exploded of late, thanks in no small part to the growing size and complexity of large language models (LLMs). These, both commercial and open, use a vast data corpus to transform a user's prompt into tokens and then return the most statistically-likely tokens in response — something which, to the user, appears like asking a question and receiving an answer.

For coding, this can be used for anything from basic autocompletion — finishing the name of a function as you type — to turning plain-text prompts into source code. Well-publicised concerns about the ethics of how the data used to feed LLMs is sourced, their tendency to spit out copyright code fragments without attribution, poor code quality, and "hallucinations" in which functions and entire libraries are recommended despite not actually existing have done little to slow demand, and Microsoft — which recently mandated that its staff use the company's LLM tools whether they want to or not — wants to be at the forefront.

The company's latest move is to turn the popular VS Code IDE into an "open-source AI editor, and the release of the GitHub Copilot Chat extension under the permissive MIT license is the first step towards that future. The release only covers part of the original extension's functionality — you can send prompts to GitHub Copilot, which serves as an intermediary to third-party LLMs including Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI's GPT-4.1, but you can't use it for inline autocompletion, a feature the VS Code team says will come "in the following months" — and only includes the VS Code extension, not the GitHub Copilot platform which underpins it and without which the extension is useless.

"Our core priorities remain intact: delivering great performance, powerful extensibility, and an intuitive, beautiful user interface," the VS Code team adds. "We're excited to shape the future of development as an open source AI editor, and we hope you’ll join us on this journey to build in the open."

The VS Code GitHub Copilot Chat extension source code is available, naturally enough, on GitHub under the permissive MIT license; using the extension requires a GitHub account with an active GitHub Copilot subscription, which includes a free tier with 50 chat requests per month and paid tiers starting at $10 a month for unlimited chat requests.