VSCodium 1.143.17232 ships a single-line fix, but the real story is what it leaves out
VSCodium, the privacy-focused rebuild of Visual Studio Code, published 1.143.17232 today, and the changelog is exactly one line. The fix (PR #3094) repairs broken settings dropdowns that a previous release's UI changes had broken. It's a patch on top of the 1.143.17183 drop, which tracks upstream Microsoft VS Code 1.143.1.
But the size of the patch undersells it. VSCodium's maintainer deliberately stripped out GitHub Copilot integration that Microsoft has now made the default in official VS Code. That decision is the whole point of the project, and it's the reason this build exists at all.
The fix, in context
Here's the entire changelog for 1.143.17232: "fix: replace removed variable with correct variable." One commit, one file, one contributor. The GitHub compare view between the two releases confirms it down to the digit.
The bug it addresses is harmless in theory but annoying in practice. As reported in issue #3092, settings dropdowns were showing up in the top-left corner of the window and staying open after you selected them. A change made while disabling VSCodium's "Modern UI" left a variable dangling. The fix branch (fix-ui-dropdown) replaced it with the right one, passed all 26 CI checks, and merged into the insider stream on October 27.
Trivial in isolation. Revealing in practice. Every cosmetic tweak VSCodium applies on top of upstream code creates follow-on bugs, and a single independent maintainer has to chase them down. That's the maintenance tax of a community rebuild, and it's the kind of thing you only notice if you're actually watching the releases.
What actually got cut
This is the part that matters. VSCodium doesn't just track VS Code and ship it unchanged. It runs the official build commands against Microsoft's vscode repository, but with the proprietary customizations removed. For the 1.143.x line that means Copilot went.
Baptiste Augrain, who publishes as daiyam, removed the Copilot API service entirely. He also disabled telemetry, dropped automated PR generation from the agent host, and switched off the "Modern UI" to return to a flat, classic layout. The latter is precisely what caused the dropdown bug. Rebranding was extended across installer dialogs in over a dozen languages.
VSCodium didn't kill AI altogether. Claude, Codex, and BYOK (bring-your-own-key) setups all still work. The positioning is model-agnostic and telemetry-free rather than anti-AI, and that's a meaningful distinction. Users pick their own harness, their own keys, their own data. Microsoft, meanwhile, picked Copilot for you.
The ideological split
This is where the story gets interesting, because Microsoft and VSCodium are now shipping two philosophically opposite products built from the same MIT-licensed source code.
VS Code 1.143, released mid-October 2026, makes the Copilot harness the default for new sessions. The "harness" is the agent layer that turns a language model into an editing agent, and there's no documented opt-out setting for regular users. 1.143 also added a "Compare models" preview, experimental on-device model support (which needs an NVIDIA GPU with 96 GB or more of VRAM), and enterprise controls that can suppress competing Claude or Codex sessions when policy demands it.
That last part is what privacy advocates pushed back on. Making Copilot the default with no opt-out, then letting enterprise policies suppress competing models, concentrates a developer's editing loop inside Microsoft's cloud. It's a deliberate direction, and it's exactly what VSCodium exists to resist.
The tension goes back to a 2015 explanation from Microsoft maintainer Chris Dias, one that VSCodium's README quotes verbatim. When you clone the vscode repo and build it yourself, none of the Microsoft endpoints are configured in the default product.json, which means you generate a clean, MIT-licensed build. VSCodium simply does that for people who don't want to do it by hand.
Why this matters
For enterprises with air-gapped setups, data-residency rules, or a general distaste for software phoning home, VSCodium remains a credible option. The distribution surface is broad: Windows installers and portable zips, macOS .dmg and zips, and Linux packages across .deb, .rpm, Snap, Flatpak, AppImage, and tarballs. It even ships RISC-V, LoongArch, PowerPC 64 LE, and s390x builds, a breadth unmatched by other "clean VS Code" rebuilds.
The numbers tell a steady-growth story. VSCodium sits at roughly 33,700 GitHub stars against official VS Code's ~194k, but Stack Overflow's developer survey usage share climbed from about 4.2% in 2023 to around 6.25% in 2025.
There's one caveat worth repeating. "Telemetry-free" applies to the VSCodium build itself, not to every extension you drop into it. The project is upfront about this and even recommends removing offenders like ms-vscode.csharp. You still need to audit your own extensions.
At this point, the VSCodium/VS Code split is just the story of the year for the project. Microsoft is baking AI-agent defaults deeper into the editor. VSCodium keeps carving out the same narrow, defensible niche it's had since 2018.
Head here to grab 1.143.17232 from the VSCodium GitHub releases page.
