Following our previous updates, GitHub Copilot for Eclipse is open source, with the code available on GitHub under the MIT license.

This marks an important milestone for GitHub Copilot in the Eclipse ecosystem. By open sourcing the plugin, we’re inviting the community to explore, learn from, and contribute to how AI-powered developer experiences are built inside Eclipse.

✨ What’s new

Why open source?

Our primary motivation is community-driven innovation and increased transparency. Eclipse has thrived for decades thanks to its open ecosystem, and we believe AI tooling should be developed in that same spirit (i.e., openly and alongside the IDE itself). Putting the Copilot for Eclipse source in the open lets developers see exactly how the plugin works, reason about what it does, and help shape where it goes next.

What’s open today?

The GitHub Copilot for Eclipse repository is publicly available here: https://github.com/microsoft/copilot-for-eclipse

With the code now open, you can see exactly how Copilot works. Explore the implementation behind chat, code completions, and agentic workflows. Review system prompts, architectural decisions, and how context is handled. You can dig into the codebase and learn how Copilot for Eclipse is built end-to-end, including:

  • Code completion: How inline code completions are produced and rendered.
  • Next Edit Suggestions (NES): How next-edit suggestions are surfaced as you work.
  • Chat: How the chat view, conversation flow, and tool calls are implemented.
  • Agent mode: How multistep agentic workflows are wired up inside Eclipse.
  • Skills and prompt files: How skills and prompt files are discovered, loaded, and invoked from chat.
  • BYOK: How Bring Your Own Key is integrated.
  • Advanced agentic capabilities: Custom agents, isolated subagents, plan agent, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration.

This is a partial list. There are additional features for you to discover in the codebase.

Contributing and feedback

We welcome contributions and feedback from the community.

  • Browse the code and open an issue to report bugs or suggest features.
  • Submit pull requests to fix bugs or improve the experience.
  • Share feedback and discussions through the project’s issue tracker.

As with any open-source project, we’ll continue to evolve contribution guidelines and collaboration processes alongside the community.

Community contributions

Since open sourcing the project, we’ve already started to see contributions from the community. We’d like to thank contributors, including:

You can view the full list of contributors on GitHub.