At its Build 2025 conference, Microsoft announced plans to open source over the next few months the code behind the GitHub Copilot Chat extension under the MIT license and refactor core AI capabilities directly into the main VS Code codebase. The move, if completed, may affect the ability of current for-pay AI code editors to compete purely on features.
Microsoft cited several reasons for open-sourcing Copilot Chat. They noted the significant advancements in large language models, which have reduced the need for and value of proprietary prompting strategies. In fact, the company Anthropic regularly releases the system prompts for their Claude models. Keeping prompts secret for long remains a difficult endeavor in the face of community-led transparency efforts. AI…