Copilot Chat in VS Code is now open source

Posted by ulugbekna 5 days ago

Copilot Chat in VS Code is now open source(github.com)

192 points | 69 comments

gatienboquet 4 days ago|

Here's the system Prompt Template they use : https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/blob/4c72d6...

rob-olmos 4 days ago|

"- cursor position marked as ${CURSOR_TAG}: Indicates where the developer's cursor is currently located, which can be crucial for understanding what part of the code they are focusing on."

I was not aware that was a thing and useful to know. Thanks!

mathgeek 4 days ago|||

Interesting to hear how others use these tools. I often phrase things as “this line/method” which implies the tool knows where my cursor is.

al_borland 4 days ago||

I use the in-line prompt when I’m talking about a specific area. In the chat I always explained in words what part of the code I’m talking about. This tidbit of information will change how I use chat.

blitzar 4 days ago||||

Isn't that needed for the tab completion?

BigGreenJorts 4 days ago|||

I assumed they had this already, but I began to suspect it didn't actually exist. Disappointed to learn I was right bc half the time copilot pretends it can't read my code and at all asks me to go look for stuff in the code.

user4673568345 4 days ago||

Copilot in vs code is kind of lackluster and really missing the sort of polish you’d expect from a company like Microsoft

idrios 1 day ago||

Not sure what polish you're looking for but it's been great for me. Smart autocomplete algorithm and good chatbot that acts like a personalized Google / stack overflow. It's not good enough to vibe code full products or debug hard issues, but that's just limitations of AI.

Also it's all Microsoft, they made both the AI and the editor. I appreciate that they don't do anything extra in the editor to favor their own extensions.

jacooper 4 days ago|||

Even after agent mode was added? My experience with it has been great, haven't tried gemini CLI or cline yet but I don't think they are going to be much better

BugsJustFindMe 3 days ago||

My repeated experience with agent mode in vscode is that it constantly claims to have made changes that it never made, and no amount of prompting and reminding and nagging seems to fix it.

jacooper 2 days ago||

With which model? It's very reliable for me.

BugsJustFindMe 2 days ago||

It seems implausible that this would be a model issue vs a local software failing to edit documents issue.

DidYaWipe 4 days ago||

USED to expect from Microsoft.

Have you even used any of their products lately? Where "lately" = the last 15 years...

koolala 4 days ago|||

Now I expect out-right malicious corruption.

Smar 4 days ago||

That sounds about right.

TiredOfLife 4 days ago|||

Where "lately" = the last 50 years

hu3 4 days ago||

Quick, someone use AI to scan the codebase and explain the decision tree of Copilot Chat with regards how it handle prompts and responses.

dataviz1000 4 days ago||

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.

1. User selects ask or edit and AskAgentIntent.handleRequest or EditAgentIntent.handleRequest is called on character return.

2. DefaultIntentRequestHandler.getResult() -> createInstance(AskAgentIntentInvocation) -> getResult -> intent.invoke -> runWithToolCalling(intentInvocation) -> createInstance(DefaultToolCallingLoop) -> loop.onDidReceiveResponse -> emit _onDidReceiveResponse -> loop.run(this.stream, pauseCtrl) -> runOne() -> getAvailableTools -> createPromptContext -> buildPrompt2 -> buildPrompt -> [somewhere in here the correct tool gets called] -> responseProcessor.processResponse -> doProcessResponse -> applyDelta ->

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/blob/main/s...

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/blob/main/s...

[2] src/extension/intents/node/toolCallingLoop.ts

chatmasta 4 days ago|||

Something I’ve wanted to hack together for a while is a custom react-renderer and react-reconciler for prompt templating so that you can write prompts with JSX.

I haven’t really thought about it beyond “JSX is a templating language and templating helps with prompt building and declarative is better than spaghetti code like LangChain.” But there’s probably some kernel of coolness there.

dataviz1000 3 days ago|||

VSCode uses @vscode/prompt-tsx [0]

They also provide documentation for all this. [1]

VSCode also provides examples. [2]

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-prompt-tsx

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/api/extension-guides/chat

[2] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-extension-samples/blob/m...

sqs 4 days ago|||

Priompt might be what you're looking for: https://github.com/anysphere/priompt.

rightbyte 4 days ago||||

>> Quick

> in a minute

Honestly. Why the hurry?

_boffin_ 4 days ago|||

Care to also check if they do prompt decomposition into multiple prompts?

dataviz1000 4 days ago||

You're asking if they break the user prompt into multiple chunks?

All I can find is counting number of tokens and trimming to make sure the current turn conversation fits. I can not find any chunking logic to make multiple requests. This logic exists in the classes that extend IIntentInvocation which as buildPrompt() method.

_boffin_ 4 days ago||

I believe it's this paper, but... not certain: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.02406

will update when i find more info.

revskill 4 days ago||

I wont trust microsoft nor google until the end if universe.

blufish 3 days ago||

microsoft now is ibm then

v5v3 4 days ago||

[flagged]

Ismoil 5 days ago||

[flagged]

treymov 4 days ago||

[flagged]

NYhacker 4 days ago||

BrentOzar 4 days ago|

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 4 days ago||

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 4 days ago|||

If you examine the merged PR's - the overwhelming majority are from Microsoft employees. Meanwhile, community contributions sit and rot.

jemiluv8 4 days ago|||

I thought they just open sourced this? Was there enough time to start reviewing community contributions?

esperent 4 days ago|||

How would I be able to examine the PRs to verify this?

msgodel 4 days ago|||

There aren't that many Microsoft employees, it took me a couple minutes to memorize the team.

Of course the majority are from Microsoft, they do seem to merge in a fair amount of PRs from the community though.

lozenge 4 days ago|||

Look at the first comment in the PR, it will have a badge "This user is a member of the Microsoft organization". Alternatively, look at the release notes on the website, any non-Microsoft contributions are listed at the bottom.

esperent 4 days ago||

Right, but how to do that for thousands of PRs to see that there's a bias? I assume it's a ton of work.

xyzzy123 3 days ago||

Why not sample 20 and see if you can spot a trend?

esperent 3 days ago||

Because I studied statistics.

xyzzy123 3 days ago||

You can get the JSON from like,

gh pr list --repo microsoft/vscode --state merged --limit 1000 --json author,mergedAt,title

Then you can do:

And see there's only 63 authors and > 90% of the merged PRs are from Microsoft (which.. fair, it's their product).

I think the signal is strong enough that you can legitimately reach the same conclusion by mk 1 eyeball.

NOTE: I'm not criticising, it's a Microsoft-driven project and I am fine with that. The _do_ merge things from "random" contributors (yay) but they are overwhelmingly things that a) fix a bug while b) being less than 5 lines of code. If that is your desired contribution then things will go well for you and arguably they do well at accepting such. But they are very unlikely to accept a complex or interesting new feature from an outsider. All of this is seems totally reasonable and expected.

DidYaWipe 4 days ago|||

Yet the Settings UI is still a nonsensical mess.

thiht 4 days ago||

How is it a nonsensical mess? It’s clean, searchable, allows to fallback to json..

I get it might not be perfect, but "nonsensical mess" is maybe in bad faith here.

DidYaWipe 3 days ago||

Valid question. There's some area where the text of the setting's state is the opposite of what the checkbox shows. I'll try to dig up a screen shot.

Historically, setting syntax colors has sucked too, but I don't remember the current state of that.

Alupis 4 days ago|||

That's because it's Microsoft's Trademarked version of Open Source.

All the good FOSS vibes, without any of the hard FOSS work...

bmitc 4 days ago|||

Out of Apple, Google, and Microsoft, Microsoft is _by far_ the most active and open to open source and contributions.

NewsaHackO 4 days ago|||

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.

jemiluv8 4 days ago|||

Agree. OSS is hard work and not obligatory.

almosthere 4 days ago||||

[flagged]

Alupis 4 days ago|||

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.

cyral 4 days ago|||

I've looked at a bunch of the popular JS libraries I depend on and they are all the same story, hundreds of open PRs. I think it's just difficult to review work from random people who may not be implementing changes the right way at all. Same with the project direction/roadmap, I'd say the majority of open source repos are like that. People will suggest ideas/direction all day and you can't listen to everyone.

Not sure for VSCode, but for .NET 9 they claim: "There were over 26,000 contributions from over 9,000 community members! "

almosthere 4 days ago||||

f. o. r. k. everything costs money, waaaay more than a $5 buy me a coffee. Every PR MS closes costs them thousands of dollars.

__jonas 4 days ago|||

Why is that bad? Seems like a perfectly valid approach for an Open Source project, SQLite is doing the same.

tomnipotent 4 days ago|||

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...

lozenge 4 days ago||

I've had a lot of PRs merged. If you don't create an issue or the issue already says it doesn't suit their vision then it won't get merged. It also helps to update the PR in November/December, even if there are no merge conflicts, as that's when they "clean up" and try to close as many as possible.

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