This repository contains a fork of Microsoft's Copilot Chat extension modified for use in Positron.
Note
This project is still in the experimental stage. For issues or questions, please refer to the main Positron repository
This repository is included in Positron as a Git submodule. It becomes one of Positron's built-in extensions.
Unlike the other built-in extensions, this one doesn't support the incremental
Typescript compiler used by the extension watch process (watch-extensionsd).
This means that you must manually recompile the extension in order for changes
to take effect:
cd positron-copilot-chat
npm run compile(There are also watch daemons that can observe and auto-recompile changes, but there are three of them, so it's annoying to use them.)
When building for release, the extension "builds" with webpack in order to integrate with Positron's build system. However, this webpack "build" really just delegates to the extension's existing esbuild system (from upstream).
You can see how this works here:
https://github.com/posit-dev/positron-copilot-chat/blob/main/extension.webpack.config.js
Copilot and Positron Assistant have parallel prompting systems. In general, the Copilot prompts remain undisturbed in this repository; we simply inject a Positron Assistant element into most of them containing Positron context for the request. This provides Copilot's service with access to the active session information, guidelines for writing code and using tools in Positron, etc.
graph LR
cp[Copilot Prompt] -- assistant API --> pa[Positron Assistant]
pa -- Positron context --> cp
cp -- rendered prompt --> cs[Copilot Service]
The <PositronAssistant> prompt-tsx element is responsible for this
integration. You can find it here:
The coupling between the Copilot Chat extension and VS Code is extremely tight. It is so tight, in fact, that the APIs is it use are neither forward nor backwards compatible, and it is necessary to update this extension in lockstep with VS Code itself. When taking new versions of VS Code, we need to do the following:
- Create a branch of this repository before the upstream merge, so we have a place to hang any patches we need to take
- Reset to
main - Find the point in history where the VS Code dependency version was bumped. For example, if Positron is updating to VS Code 1.103, we need to find where the Copilot Chat upstream extension lost 1.103 compatibility, and point at the commit before that.
- Merge the history up to that point into Copilot Chat, resolving conflicts
- Include the submodule bump in the Positron upstream merge PR