Copilot Chat in VS Code is now open source
16 comments
·June 27, 2025hu3
dataviz1000
I very much need to know this also. First, tools [0] and prompts [1]. I'll get back to you in a minute while I back trace the calling path. One thing to note is that they use .tsx for rendering the prompts and tool responses.
[0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/blob/main/s...
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/blob/main/s...
xenophonf
What is Copilot Chat but a front end to some Microsoft SaaS offering? There's nothing materially "open source" about that. All the important stuff is locked up behind the GitHub Copilot API. No one can customize the LLM design or training material. It certainly can't be self-hosted. This is just in-app advertising for yet another subscription service that sends your personal data to an amoral third party. There's no community, no public benefit, no commonwealth.
dawnofdusk
I mean you're right it's just a front end. And front ends can be open sourced? Obviously this has some public value: other people don't have to build a frontend starting from zero.
I don't think it's well-aimed criticism to say that the LLM design/training material itself should have been made open source. Pretty much no one in the open source community would have the computational resources to actually do anything with this...
mirekrusin
There are just two forms of code - public domain and private. It's just that some people don't see it yet.
BrentOzar
I have a hard time getting excited about this when they have such an atrocious record of handling pull requests in VS Code already: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pulls
msgodel
It looks to me like they close nearly 30 PRs every day. That's kind of amazing.
I'm no fan of Microsoft but that's a massive maintenance burden. They must have multiple people working on this full time.
Alupis
If you examine the merged PR's - the overwhelming majority are from Microsoft employees. Meanwhile, community contributions sit and rot.
Alupis
That's because it's Microsoft's Trademarked version of Open Source.
All the good FOSS vibes, without any of the hard FOSS work...
NewsaHackO
I hate this analogy. Just because something is open source, doesn’t mean it is forced to commit or comment on every pull request which takes development time. If that notion really bothers you, you are free to fork VSCode and close all 600 pull requests on your fork.
Alupis
It's a common theme across most (all?) Microsoft "Open Source" repos. They publish the codebase on Github (which implies a certain thing on it's own), but accept very little community input/contributions - if any.
These repo's will usually have half a dozen or more Microsoft Employees with "Project Manager" titles and the like - extremely "top heavy". All development, decision making, roadmap and more are done behind closed doors. PR's go dormant for months or years... Issues get some sort of cursory "thanks for the input" response from a PM... then crickets.
I'm not arguing all open source needs to be a community and accept contributions. But let's be honest - this is deliberate on Microsoft's part. They want the "good vibes" of being open source friendly - but corporate Microsoft still isn't ready to embrace open source. ie, it's fake open source.
almosthere
this
tomnipotent
I'm not sure I see the problem. The number of merged PR's looks on the high side for a FOSS project.
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclo...
Ismoil
[flagged]
treymov
[flagged]
Quick, someone use AI to scan the codebase and explain the decision tree of Copilot Chat with regards how it handle prompts and responses.