The VS Code team, in this update, announces their first major milestone: open sourcing the GitHub Copilot Chat extension under the MIT license. This move invites the community to explore, contribute, and help shape the future of AI-powered development in VS Code.

Open Source AI Editor: First Milestone

Published June 30th, 2025 by the VS Code Team

The Visual Studio Code (VS Code) team has officially open sourced the GitHub Copilot Chat extension, marking a significant step toward making VS Code the first open source AI editor.

Why Open Source GitHub Copilot Chat?

The team emphasizes community-driven innovation and data transparency as primary motivators. By open sourcing AI experiences within VS Code, the team aims to leverage the creativity and expertise of the vibrant open-source developer community. They believe that AI should be developed openly alongside the core editor, encouraging greater transparency in how AI-powered features are implemented.

What Does This Mean for Developers?

Explore the Codebase: The full source code for GitHub Copilot Chat is now available on GitHub under the MIT license.
Transparency: Developers can review system prompts, implementation details, agent mode logic, and telemetry capture, providing full visibility into how Copilot Chat works.
Learning Opportunity: You can understand and experiment with how agent mode operates, including how context is sent to LLMs and how prompt engineering is managed in an open-source setting.
Contribution Welcomed: The team invites feedback, pull requests, and issue reports from the community. All issues are currently tracked in the VS Code repository.

Roadmap and What’s Next

The current focus is on carefully refactoring components of the Copilot Chat extension into the VS Code core codebase.
The original GitHub Copilot extension (for inline completions) remains closed source for now, but the team plans to eventually provide those features via the open sourced Copilot Chat extension.
Ongoing partnership with the open source AI community to refine the future development roadmap and ensure coverage of impactful scenarios.

Get Involved

View the full announcement.
Explore the Copilot Chat repo.
Read the contributing guide and learn how to participate.
Check out their FAQ for common questions.

The VS Code team encourages all developers and AI enthusiasts to join this initiative to build AI-driven coding experiences in the open and shape the editor’s future.

Happy coding! — The VS Code Team

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