Wanted: Simple way to entirely disable copilot

[kinnison]

I keep doing my best to have the copilot features entirely disabled, and yet no matter what I do, release after release things keep creeping in.

Now there's some kind of hideous inline agent thing popping up when I make new files.

My workplace explicitly forbids the use of AI agents, but if vscode keeps trying to force copilot on me, eventually I'll slip up and risk being fired for breaking the rules.

Please give me a trivial mechanism to 100% disable, in a future-proof way, copilot in settings.json.

[JC-Coder]

Have you tried uninstalling the extension ?

[kinnison]

Have you tried uninstalling the extension ?

I do not have the extension installed. I never have.

[JC-Coder]

Can you make a short video on a random project to show the behaviour of the ai giving you suggestion even when copilot is not installed.

[kinnison]

Can you make a short video on a random project to show the behaviour of the ai giving you suggestion even when copilot is not installed.

I apologise if I wasn't clear before - I am not being offered content suggestions (yet) because I have as much as possible disabled. What I am being presented with is continuous exhortations to enable things. In this instance despite previously configuring the things to not appear via settings.json, a copilot dropdown was present at the top of the window (controls) and at the bottom (status bar) and also when creating a new file I was being prompted to press keys to begin an interactive agent session, rather than simply being left alone to get on with my programming task.

Imagine, if you will, that you work somewhere that requires that you never accept the advice of someone who keeps popping up beside you every time you try and do something to ask if you would, pretty please, let them help you to do your job.

It is this constant barrage of well-mannered, and presumably well-meaning, "offers" of help which is unacceptable here and which I am seeking a mechanism to disable from settings.json. Regardless of my personal feelings on the matter, my workplace explicitly bans the use of AI agents and while for now I am personally strong enough of mind to avoid the temptation, I am also seeking mechanisms by which we might help newer engineers to avoid it as well.

[JC-Coder]

Okay thanks for clarifying this . Please add the following settings below to your vs code settings and workspace (if not already added)

1. settings.json

 "extensions.ignoreRecommendations": true,
"workbench.tips.enabled": false,
"workbench.enableExperiments": false,
"github.copilot.enable": false,
"github.copilot.inlineSuggest.enable": false,

2. Create a new file ".vscode/extensions.json" Then add this in the file

{
  "unwantedRecommendations": [
    "GitHub.copilot",
    "GitHub.copilot-chat",
    "ms-vscode.vscode-ai"
  ]
}

Let me know if you still get suggestions after these settings

[kinnison]

Thank you for those suggestions. I've added those settings to my settings.json and based on the dimming of the rows, I'd say that the two github.copilot. settings are not recognised (presumably because I don't have the extension installed) but the others appear to have taken.

I tried disabling the suite of settings I already had as an attempt to excise copilot from my UI, but without at least one of them, the copilot controls reappeared in the top bar, though everything in the menu (including 'hide copilot') was disabled except for the top item "Use ai features with copilot for free..."

re-adding "chat.commandCenter.enabled": false, seems to have turned that back off.

I think, therefore, I will keep my suite of disabling instructions for now, totalling (including your new suggestions):

        "chat.commandCenter.enabled" = false;
        "chat.experimental.offerSetup" = false;
        "chat.experimental.statusIndicator.enabled" = false;
        "chat.agent.enabled" = false;
        "chat.extensionTools.enabled" = false;
        "chat.agent.maxRequests" = 0;
        "accessibility.verbosity.inlineChat" = false;
        "chat.detectParticipant.enabled" = false;
        "chat.implicitContext.enabled" = {
          "panel" = "never";
          "editing-session" = "never";
        };
        "chat.mcp.enabled" = false;
        "chat.setupFromDialog" = false;
        "chat.unifiedChatView" = false;
        "extensions.ignoreRecommendations" = true;
        "workbench.tips.enabled" = false;
        "workbench.enableExperiments" = false;
        "github.copilot.enable" = false;
        "github.copilot.inlineSuggest.enable" = false;

I appreciate that the two chat.experimental. options are probably obsolete now, so I may remove them; and vscode is telling me that several of the other settings are experimental so may change. My hope is that with the suggestions you made above, it will be sufficient.

I shall keep an eye on things and see if in the next vscode update, things sneak back in. Thank you for your suggestions thus-far. I'd far prefer to continue to be able to recommend vscode to colleagues, and to use it myself, so this is very important to us.

[isidorn]

Our FAQ already answers this question https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/FAQ

Can I disable AI functionality in VS Code? You can disable the built-in AI functionality in VS Code by selecting Hide Copilot in the Command Palette or selecting Hide Copilot from the Copilot menu in the VS Code title bar.

Let me know if that does not work for you.

[kinnison]

[snip]

Let me know if that does not work for you.

None of these approaches are settings.json based. In fact they seem to store their configuration in an sqlite file which makes it very hard to automate the configuration on new installations.

Also, even with the copilot icons hidden, I was having the in-line conversation prompts appear in empty files until I used the configurations listed above.

[ghost]

Please give us a setting that allows us to fully disable all the stuff related with AI or LLM or copilot or mcp in VSCODE.

All this is fine but I also use vscode on older machines where I have no use for llm or any of this.

Please don't make us keep track of ever changing options as this becomes more and more ingrained into vscode.

[nlsdg]

If your company forbids AI agents and supports VSCode: they can configure policies to enforce certain settings. See https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/setup/enterprise

There are a few AI/Copilot related settings in the policies, and ways to restrict and allow extensions. Unfortunately no setting to disable AI agents completely that I can see at the moment. That might change. See #249615 and pull request #251110 associated with it.

[vs-code-engineering[bot]]

Hey @isidorn, this issue might need further attention.

@kinnison, you can help us out by closing this issue if the problem no longer exists, or adding more information.

[kinnison]

This remains an issue, as does the ever increasing pushiness of Microsoft in general regarding Copilot. There is no additional attention/information needed beyond the authors of VSCode doing as requested.

[isidorn]

• We now have a setting chat.disableAIFeatures that you can use to hide Copilot
• There is still the title bar menu entry that takes the user to this setting (to make it discoverable)

This is documented in our upcoming release notes https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-docs/blob/vnext/release-notes/v1_104.md#setting-to-hide-and-disable-github-copilot-ai-features

Try it out in latest VS Code insiders. And if you feel like something is missing let me know. Thank you 🙏

[kinnison]

At this point I am grateful that you've done that work, and I will let my colleagues know about that configuration setting.

However I have switched from vscode to helix in order to avoid having AI agents pushed at me so I cannot check it myself. I shall therefore close this issue.