#Visual studio code copilot software#

(2)īut what’s in the past is done - now knowing they have GitHub Copilot, Microsoft can create new APIs that would be useful for Copilot development and never release them, inherently restricting competitors. Unfortunately for Microsoft, they can’t “un-open-source” this API since that would break tons of other extensions and is generally a really bad look if they want to maintain the “open” facade. That’s the same thing that we and all other tools that involve code completion use. To dive deeper, for VSCode, the Copilot pair programmer experience is enabled by an API called the InlineCompletionProvider in order to show and accept suggestions that weren’t really part of the code. Probably to no surprise, Microsoft has chosen the latter. So with a generational opportunity in generative AI at their hands with GitHub Copilot and ownership of the largest distribution channel with VSCode, Microsoft has a decision to make - does it stay true to the ethos of VSCode and allow for fair competition, or does it wield ownership over VSCode as a weapon to try to squash Copilot competitors? In just 9 months, we have completely flown past more than 3 years of Copilot development. Ourselves at Codeium started as a Copilot alternative, but now also offer chat and search on top of autocomplete, not to mention more advanced code LLMs and up-to-date, higher quality training datasets. And GitHub is quickly figuring out that it is really easy for a small yet strong team to completely outperform and out-develop Copilot. For a while, Copilot was the only generative-AI-for-developers tool out there, but now there’s a million. This is, after all, the main differentiator compared to other standalone IDEs. VSCode claims to be both open and extension creator friendly. (1)īut here’s where things get a little complicated. You don’t believe me yet? Just look at the VisualStudio home page:īy all intents and purposes, this page is just an ad for GitHub Copilot. There is no way Microsoft could have seen this coming in 2015, but they landed on the goldmine.

VSCode is Microsoft’s distribution channel to developers to upsell GitHub’s AI tools. While Microsoft can keep VSCode open and free, they can totally charge for GitHub Copilot while still looking like the good guys with respect to VSCode, and you better believe developers will pay. GitHub Copilot was the first tool that brought LLMs to devs via code autocomplete.

#Visual studio code copilot software#

In case you’ve somehow missed it, there is general consensus that generative AI is going to change how people work, and that includes software developers. How GitHub Copilot Changes the VSCode Story Without knowing it, Microsoft built VSCode for GitHub Copilot. But it turns out even Microsoft didn’t see the answer coming. What does Microsoft really get? Maybe in the beginning, telemetry was the real answer, from whichever developers didn’t opt out.

And while telemetry does exist, this is pretty easily disabled (not to mention, the telemetry code is all public). Almost all of the code was open source, so there isn’t a whole lot of secret IP, and it didn’t seem like any actually powerful logic was “hidden.” Given the number of popular extensions not built by Microsoft, the motive couldn’t be control over all use cases. It is an IDE that is powerful right out of the box but doesn’t feel constrained in any real way.īut there was a thought nagging me the entire time - Microsoft isn’t necessarily known to just “be the good guy,” so there must be an ulterior motive for capturing developers on their platform. The openness, both from a source code and an external contributor aspect, is what makes VSCode special, not the former set of features. And it isn’t necessarily surprising - VSCode has really good inbuilt debugging, syntax highlighting, Git integration, etc, but much more importantly, has a vibrant extension marketplace and flexible customization on pretty much every setting available. Surely enough, in last year’s StackOverflow developer survey, almost 75% of respondents said they used VSCode. Microsoft has a history of building solid products and distributing like no other. When Microsoft launched Visual Studio Code (VSCode) IDE in 2015, promising to open-source most, if not all, of the source code behind it, I was both excited and a little confused.