VSCodium 1.143.17183 Strips Copilot as VS Code Makes It the Default
VSCodium's community-built, telemetry-free editor pulls Copilot out of its latest build even as Microsoft wires the editor around a paid AI service.
VSCodium shipped its latest stable build today, and the timing says something. Microsoft's freshly released VS Code 1.143 leans hard on Copilot. VSCodium 1.143.17183, out today, quietly removes much of that.
The new build is based on VS Code 1.143.1. Its releaser is Baptiste Augrain, known on GitHub as daiyam, who does most of VSCodium's maintenance and also holds the macOS signing certificate. The head commit reads simply as "feat(1.143.1): update version."
That one-liner undersells the release. Dig into the commits and you'll find eight changes jammed into roughly a single week, driven by a deliberate effort to strip Copilot-dependent code from an editor that now makes Copilot the default.
Stripping Copilot from a Copilot-first build
Microsoft isn't mincing words here. VS Code 1.143 makes the "Copilot harness" the default for new sessions. PR title and description generation now route through a utility model tied to a Copilot sign-in, and the whole thing runs on the Copilot SDK.
VSCodium is doing the opposite.
The commit labelled "fix: copilot removal" deletes copilotApiService.ts and copilotSkuTelemetry.ts, drops the Copilot-backed PR title-generation logic, and scrubs Copilot telemetry calls from the agent host's reporter. That feature degrades to manual entry rather than phoning out to Microsoft.
The result is functionally the same editor, minus the pieces that require or phone home to a Copilot account. VSCodium still ships the multi-model agent host, so Claude, Codex, and bring-your-own-key all keep working. It's just renamed. "Copilot SDK runtime diagnostics" becomes "!!APP_NAME!! SDK runtime diagnostics."
This isn't a one-off. Copilot removal has been VSCodium's standing policy for a while, and this release just advances it at the exact moment Microsoft makes Copilot the default experience.
Two more tweaks worth knowing about
The build also flips VS Code's modernUI setting from true to false by default. That gets you the classic, flat workbench layout instead of Microsoft's floating-card aesthetic with rounded corners. It's a move VSCodium has made before, having previously disabled the modern title bar, and it fits a project that reverts upstream UI changes users tend to dislike.
Separately, the maintainers broadened the branding patch. The hardcoded "Visual Studio Code" and "VS Code" strings now get replaced throughout the app, including installer update dialogs in a dozen languages, bundled theme descriptions, walkthroughs, and remote-connection error messages.
Then there's a Windows-only fix that matters more than its narrow scope suggests. Microsoft's inno-updater moved to version 0.26.0 and dropped the file-swap-on-quit behavior that background auto-updates rely on. That quietly broke VSCodium's ability to swap in files without fanfare. Augrain's fix enables a versioned update path with a custom inno_update, and the Kodia maintainers spotted the same problem around the same time — a reminder of how many people maintain forks of the same editor.
Keep in mind that VSCodium doesn't fork VS Code at all. It's a set of build scripts that clones Microsoft's public source tree, applies a patch set to strip telemetry and branding, swaps the marketplace for Open VSX, and rebuilds under the MIT license. The binaries are functionally identical to VS Code, only cleaner.
Anyone can reproduce the whole thing. The CI clones the upstream, runs prepare_vscode.sh, applies the patches, swaps in its own product.json, strips telemetry with undo_telemetry.sh, signs the binaries (Windows signing comes free from SignPath.io, macOS from Augrain), and publishes to GitHub Releases. Rebuild it yourself and you don't have to trust the binary.
The performance gains in 1.143.1 are worth a mention, since VSCodium inherits them. You still get the model-comparison tools, on-device inference, and a big speedup on large chats. A roughly 530 MB chat that took 35.6 seconds to cold-open now loads in 9.0 seconds, with unresponsive time dropping from 28.3 seconds down to 0.6. Those aren't small numbers.
It's a modest-looking release on paper, honestly. But the choice to strip Copilot from a build that ships with it by default, while disabling a UI change most people haven't noticed yet, is a pointed one. VSCodium makes a case that you can run the exact same editor codebase and still opt out of the surveillance-and-subscription trajectory Microsoft is pushing.
Head here to the GitHub release page to grab the binaries.
