⚠️ Note: This is not a bug report.

I’m using this issue template because there does not appear to be a Discussions or Q&A channel for architectural or design questions. Please feel free to close this issue if there is a more appropriate place to ask.

Hello Live Share team,

First of all, thank you for building and maintaining VS Code Live Share. It has become a critical foundation for real-time code collaboration, and we are actively building on top of it.

I’m reaching out to ask for guidance on a UI / integration question related to Live Share, in the context of an open-source research project we are developing.

Background

We are building an open-source project called Conductor:
https://github.com/KalokUmich/conducator

The goal of Conductor is to explore a new workflow that combines:

• Real-time code collaboration (via VS Code Live Share)
• Structured team discussion during coding sessions
• AI-assisted summarization and code-change proposals
• Explicit human approval and governance (no autonomous code changes)

In short, we are experimenting with AI + meetings + code collaboration to improve engineering decision-making and reduce friction in group coding sessions.

This project is not commercial and is intended purely for research and experimentation.

Current Architecture (Working Today)

Our current MVP architecture looks like this:

• VS Code Live Share is used as the transport layer for:

  • Shared workspace
  • File synchronization
  • Debugging and terminal sharing

• A host-only VS Code extension (Conductor) runs on the Live Share host

• A shared discussion/chat layer runs alongside Live Share:

  • Host participates via a VS Code WebView
  • Guests participate via a browser-based UI

• A unified invite page links both:

  • The Live Share join link
  • The Conductor discussion room

This works well functionally, but it requires participants to interact with two surfaces:

• VS Code (for code)
• Browser (for discussion)

The Question We’re Exploring

We are trying to understand whether tighter UI integration with Live Share is technically possible or explicitly out of scope.

Specifically, we are curious about:

• Whether Live Share exposes (or plans to expose) any hooks or APIs that would allow:

  • Embedding or referencing Live Share session state from an external UI
  • Or integrating additional collaboration UI elements alongside the Live Share experience

• Whether the Live Share web / vscode.dev experience could theoretically be:

  • Embedded via iframe, or
  • Accessed in a controlled way by another tool for coordinated UX

• Or if Live Share is intentionally designed as a closed surface (which we fully understand and respect)

We are not looking to modify Live Share behavior, intercept traffic, or bypass security boundaries — only to understand what integration patterns are considered feasible or supported.

What We Are NOT Asking For

To be very clear, we are not asking for:

• Access to internal Live Share protocols
• Any private APIs
• Any changes that would weaken security or isolation
• Any commitment to support this use case

We are simply trying to align our design with Live Share’s intended extensibility boundaries.

Why We’re Asking You

Rather than guessing or building fragile workarounds, we wanted to ask the Live Share team directly:

• Is deeper UI-level integration fundamentally unsupported by design?
• Are there recommended patterns for tools that want to augment Live Share sessions without duplicating code-sharing functionality?
• Or should tools like ours continue to treat Live Share strictly as an external transport layer?

Even a short directional answer (e.g. “not supported and unlikely” vs “possible but not today”) would be extremely helpful for guiding our architecture.

Closing

We deeply appreciate the work you’ve done on Live Share — our project would not exist without it.

If this is not the right channel or team to ask, we’d be grateful for any pointers on where such questions should go.

Thank you very much for your time,
and thank you again for building Live Share.

Best regards,
Ka Lok Kam
Conductor (open-source research project)
https://github.com/KalokUmich/conducator