On the opening day of its BUILD 2025 conference, Microsoft has announced that GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code is now open source. This means that anyone can take the code and build their own project based on it, or just track Microsoft’s development of the software.
The move will see the AI-powered capabilities from the GitHub Copilot extensions be included in the Visual Studio Code open-source repository. Microsoft said this “reflects our commitment to transparency, community-driven innovation, and to giving developers a greater voice in shaping the future of AI-assisted development.”
This is not the only GitHub Copilot update that the Redmond giant has for us. It also said that the tool will evolve from an in-editor assistant to an agentic AI partner with an autonomous, asynchronous developer agent. This will give GitHub Copilot the power to test, iterate, and refine code. Developers will be able to delegate routine and specialized tasks to the AI, making it more of an AI teammate rather than just a tool.
Another neat feature that Microsoft has announced is GitHub Models, a centralized hub where developers can explore models and create, store, evaluate, and share prompts, while staying in GitHub. This will also integrate organization-level model controls so that developers can experiment and build with guardrails to work securely.
If you've never tried GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code, you can give it a go by downloading Visual Studio Code for Windows, Mac, or Linux and opening the GitHub Copilot tool and logging into your GitHub account. The free tier is quite generous, offering 50 agent mode or chat requests per month, 2,000 completions per month, and access to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o, and more. There are paid tiers if you need higher usage.
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