Microsoft has deprecated IntelliCode extensions for VS Code in favor of GitHub Copilot Chat. While this also provides advanced suggestions and inline completions, its free tier is limited to 2,000 suggestions per month, and as Copilot provides a suggestion with every input, this doesn't last long.

Last year Microsoft announced two new APIs for using the language models of GitHub Copilot in VS Code: a chat API and a language model API. The extensions mean developers can add extensions that use the APIs for Copilot to build custom chat participants that users can interact with in the GitHub Copilot Chat view in VS Code.

Visual Studio IntelliCode was announced as an experimental extension for Visual Studio 2017 back in 2018. The extension was designed to improve developer productivity with features like contextual IntelliSense, inference and enforcement for code styles, and focused reviews for your pull requests. Cumulatively, the extensions had over 70 million downloads, but are now deprecated and the gray inline suggestions no longer work.

IntelliCode has until now provided AI-assisted code completions for Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java and C#. The news that Microsoft is moving away from it came via a post on Microsoft's VSCode-DotNetTools repo on GitHub, which just said "We are officially deprecating the following VS Code IntelliCode extensions".  The list of extensions being deprecated is:

• IntelliCode Completions
• IntelliCode for C# Dev Kit
• IntelliCode API Usage Examples

The deprecations mean that starred (⭐) completions in the code completion list (IntelliSense) are no longer shown. The code completion list is still provided, just without ⭐s.
Inline (gray text) suggestions are also removed, and no new features will be added for the listed extensions. Bug fixes and support will end immediately for the listed extensions.

Microsoft said developers will still get language server-powered code completion lists (IntelliSense) along with signature help, hover information, diagnostics, syntax highlighting, and more from Roslyn in VS Code.

The post then continues:

"For AI-assisted coding, we recommend using GitHub Copilot Chat, which provides advanced suggestions and inline completions."

For the first 2,000 suggestions a month, this will be fine, but after that developers will need to pay at least $10 a month for a license, or $100 a year. IntelliCode was based on a local model, so was unlimited and free.

At the moment, in contrast to VS Code, Visual Studio 2026 (Version 18.0) which was recently released, still has IntelliCode as an optional component. However, Microsoft has said that new productivity features like Adaptive Paste and Agent HQ orchestration are instead built into GitHub Copilot. The announcement on GitHub says that Agent HQ is not a feature, but a move towards integrating agents from multiple vendors into the coding workflow.

The reaction to the change from developers has mainly been unfavorable. The fact is that Microsoft has always had its own commercial success at the heart of its decision making, even in cases such as the open source VS Code.

More Information

Announcement On GitHub

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