Set up Copilot in VS Code

You’ve cloned orders-service, you’ve spotted the ordering bug, and you have no agent yet. This is the shortest lesson in the chapter, because getting Copilot running in VS Code genuinely is a few clicks — but there’s a framing worth setting on the first run, because it shapes how you’ll think about the tool for the rest of the course.

Getting the extension

GitHub Copilot ships as an extension for VS Code. You install it the same way you install anything else: open the Extensions view, search for GitHub Copilot, and install it. On a current VS Code it’s a featured, first-party extension, so it’s the top hit. Installing it pulls in its companion, GitHub Copilot Chat — the two work together, and the chat half is the one this course spends almost all its time in.

Then you sign in. Copilot is tied to a GitHub account and a Copilot plan, so the first run prompts you to authorize VS Code against GitHub in the browser. If you’re at a company that provides Copilot, your access comes through your organization’s plan — you sign in with the GitHub account your employer has licensed, and any policies they’ve set (which features are on, which models are available) come down with it. That’s a detail worth noting now and revisiting later: at a locked-down shop, what you can do with Copilot is partly decided above your account. We’ll hit the specific places that bites — organization rules, model availability — when they matter.

Because the exact install steps and sign-in flow shift over time, treat the official VS Code Copilot docs as the source of truth for the current setup on your machine.

One assistant, several surfaces

Here’s the framing to set now. The thing you just installed isn’t a single feature — it’s one assistant that shows up across several surfaces in the editor, and they feel different enough that it’s easy to think they’re separate tools:

• Completions — the grey ghost text that appears inline as you type, suggesting the rest of a line or a whole block. This is the original Copilot, and it never goes away.
• Chat — a conversational panel where you ask questions, request changes, and hand off whole tasks. This is where the agent lives, and where this course spends its time.
• And later you’ll meet it in other places still — inline chat right in the editor, and an asynchronous agent that works on GitHub itself without the editor open at all.

It’s all the same Copilot, reading the same project, shaped by the same rules you’ll teach it in a few chapters’ time. The surface is just where you happen to be standing. Keep that in mind, because the instinct “I learned the chat panel, now I have to learn this other thing” is mostly wrong — what you learn about steering Copilot carries from one surface to the next.

Confirm it’s alive

Two quick checks before you move on. Open a code file in orders-service and start typing a line — you should see ghost text offer a completion within a second or two. Then open the Chat view (it has its own icon in the Activity Bar, or you can summon it from the Command Palette) and ask it something harmless about the project — “what does this service do?” A good first answer means it’s installed, authorized, and reading your workspace.

Copilot is running inside orders-service and can see your code. Next, the part that trips people up: those two surfaces — completions and chat — aren’t interchangeable, and reaching for the wrong one is the most common early mistake. Next: completions vs chat.