GitHub Copilot Chat Goes Open Source: Transparency in AI Coding

Microsoft open-sourced the GitHub Copilot Chat extension for VS Code, offering unprecedented transparency into its AI-powered code assistant. Copilot Chat understands codebases, helping developers clean up functions, add error handling, explain logic, and even refactor files. Its 'Agent mode' automates compilation, error fixing, test monitoring, and more. While the underlying models remain closed-source, the open-sourced VS Code extension allows auditing, customization, and even building new tools on top of it, significantly increasing trust and transparency in AI tools.