We will open source the code in the GitHub Copilot Chat extension under the MIT license, then carefully refactor the relevant components of the extension into VS Code core.
So they’re open-sourcing some minor glue to connect to an API of a big proprietary online service, or what’s this about?
For example, that someone could fork it and make it use a local or self-hosted LLM instead. Yes I know, other alternatives exist (Continue extension) but aren’t that good.
I wouldn’t hate that. I’ve been meaning to try some AI extension to add to my VSCodium install to talk to my self hosted AI instance.
It would be fun to compare it to a de-microsoted extension
I wonder if this will make its way into vscodium
Just found out about it and will be downloading it soon!
This is getting downvoted but how is this not good? Perhaps if you are adamant about not having this feature in your editor?
It’s an extension so it can be deactivated. That’s good. But it is a lot of effort and time invested on a feature no one requested, to shoehorn people into workflows that have been proven to be unproductive and introduce another telemetry spying vector. While several performance issues and years old bugs remain ignored. So of course people hate it.
It’s an extension so it can be deactivated
Article says:
[…] then carefully refactor the relevant components of the extension into VS Code core.
So… maybe you won’t be able to deactivate it anymore. Not cool, microsoft (but totally expected).
it is a lot of effort and time invested on a feature no one requested
At my last job there were several people using copilot very successfully, some even had the paid subscription, and clearly it was very useful to them. I tried it and found it not that good, barely saves me any time and sometimes actively wastes time, but that’s me. I won’t judge if others want to use it, as long as the code gets reviewed by humans, like during a pull request (and it was, in our case).
It’s just a tool. Just because I don’t find it very useful, I shouldn’t tell others not to use it.
One thing I don’t like though, the article says:
then carefully refactor the relevant components of the extension into VS Code core.
So … you won’t be able to deactivate it anymore? not cool, it I interpreted it correctly.
At least the spying vector is open.
But the poor performance is due to TypeScript and later this year they will release a Go compiler that will make it 10 times faster.
The auto-complete in VSCode is one of the few AI use cases that I actually find useful. Passing a whole bunch of args in a python class function call to set instance variables just becomes that little bit less tedious. Lots of little things like that add up to nice time savings.
The “ask copilot” features are absolutely terrible though.
