Inception for GitHub Copilot Chat

Use Inception Mercury models directly from the GitHub Copilot Chat model picker in Visual Studio Code.

Setup

1. Install the extension in VS Code 1.125 or newer with GitHub Copilot Chat available.
2. Create an API key in Inception Platform.
3. Open Chat: Manage Language Models, add Inception, and enter your API key. Each provider entry keeps its own credentials.
4. Select Mercury 2 in Copilot Chat.

Alternatively, run Inception: Configure API Key to keep a command-managed key in VS Code Secret Storage. Use Inception: Test Inference to check that key, Inception: Refresh Models to refresh discovery, or Inception: Remove API Key to remove it. These commands operate on the command-managed key; native provider entries are managed through Manage Language Models.

Features

• Live chat-only model discovery, with a Mercury 2 fallback when discovery is unavailable.
• Streaming text, sequential tool calling, usage reporting, cancellation, and total/idle request timeouts.
• Mercury 2 reasoning choices: Instant, Low, Medium (default), and High.
• Model picker pricing from live discovery (per-million input/output/cached rates) shown in the picker tooltip and fields.
• Merged status bar indicator ($(sparkle) Inception): locally tracked token usage in the text and tooltip, with one menu (Inception: Show Usage) covering usage details, inline-completion toggles, the completion model, and connection actions.
• Local usage tracking across Copilot Chat and inline completions, persisted across sessions, with a dashboard deep link (inceptionCopilot.openUsage).
• Inline autocomplete for any file via the Inception fill-in-the-middle endpoint and Mercury Edit, with debounce, cancellation, and a per-request timeout.
• Next-edit suggestions via the Inception edit endpoint, using recently viewed snippets, a cursor-centered editable region, and your recent edit history.
• Inline-completion controls (toggle either feature, switch the completion model, open settings) live in the merged status bar menu (Inception: Show Usage).
• Optional outcome feedback: accepted suggestions are reported to Inception to improve model quality, sending only outcome metadata (inceptionCopilot.sendFeedback).

Mercury 2 currently advertises a 128,000-token context window and 50,000-token maximum output. The default request output budget is 16,384 tokens. Live model limits override fallback metadata. Token counting is an estimate (characters divided by four).

Autocomplete

Inline suggestions come from the Mercury Edit fill-in-the-middle endpoint, separate from Copilot Chat's model picker. Suggestions are insertions at the cursor (or a replace-to-end-of-line while the IntelliSense widget is open); multi-line edits and deletions are not provided.

Next edit

Next-edit suggestions watch your recent edits and cursor positions in other files, send a cursor-centered editable region (default 15 lines) plus recent snippets and a diff history to the Inception edit endpoint, and show the predicted change inline. The stable VS Code inline-completion API can only express insertions and single-line replacements, so multi-line rewrites and deletions are skipped rather than approximated.

Next-edit is off by default — enable it from the status bar menu or with inceptionCopilot.nextEdit.enabled. Autocomplete remains on by default so a fresh install sends one request per typing pause instead of two.

Using both with Copilot

Multiple inline-completion extensions can compete for Tab. For the best experience, disable other providers (for example editor.inlineSuggest toggles the feature globally, and GitHub Copilot's own suggestions can be turned off per language). Both Inception features can be toggled independently from the status bar menu or disabled in settings.

Usage tracking

The extension tracks tokens and requests locally on this device: every Copilot Chat response plus accepted inline autocomplete and next-edit requests accumulate into a per-credential snapshot that survives restarts. A single merged status bar item shows compact totals ($(graph) Inception …) with completion feature states in its tooltip, and Inception: Show Usage opens one menu with tracked tokens (input, output, cached, reasoning), an estimated spend, the inline-completion toggles and model picker, and a dashboard deep link (Inception: Open Usage Dashboard opens the Inception Platform usage page). The inceptionCopilot.showUsageStatusBar setting hides the item (the menu stays reachable from the command palette).

Estimates use the published Mercury rates ($0.25 input, $0.025 cached input, $0.75 output per 1M tokens) applied to reported token counts. Counts are device-local: they start when the extension first records usage, exclude other tools sharing your key, and do not reflect Inception's billing or the free-token grant — the Inception dashboard is authoritative. No prompts, responses, or API keys are stored; only token counts, model ids, and request outcome metadata.

Settings

Development

Use Node.js 22+ and npm. Run npm ci, npm run check, and npm run package. Press F5 to launch the Extension Development Host. Tests are colocated under src/. See development and security.

API credentials stay in VS Code Secret Storage or native secret provider configuration. Requests go directly to https://api.inceptionlabs.ai/v1; no proxy is involved. .env is only for explicitly invoked local smoke tests and is excluded from Git and the VSIX.

This is an independent community extension, unaffiliated with Inception Labs, Microsoft, or GitHub. API usage is billed by Inception.

References

• Inception documentation
• Inception API schema
• Sibling Poolside provider
• Sibling OpenAI OAuth provider

MIT license.