VS Code Copilot Chat — OmniCopilot extension

OmniCopilot puts every model your OmniRoute serves into the native GitHub Copilot Chat model picker. No second sidebar, no separate chat UI — Copilot's agent mode, tool calling, MCP servers and custom instructions all keep working, just running on the model you pick.

No Copilot subscription needed. Since VS Code 1.122 a language-model provider works without a GitHub sign-in and without any Copilot plan. Inline completions and embeddings-based features stay outside the provider API and still require Copilot.

Setup

1. Run OmniRoute — npm install -g omniroute && omniroute (dashboard on http://localhost:20128).
2. Install the extension — search "OmniRoute" in the Extensions view.
3. Pick a model — Copilot Chat → model picker → Manage Models… → OmniRoute, then tick what you want.

Nothing to configure when OmniRoute runs on the default port. For a remote instance, open the OmniRoute icon in the Activity Bar (or run OmniRoute: Manage Connection) and set:

• Server URL — the server root, e.g. http://192.168.0.15:20128. The /v1 suffix is appended by the extension; do not include it.
• API key — only when the server sets REQUIRE_API_KEY. Stored in the OS keychain via VS Code SecretStorage, never in settings.json.

What the picker will show

The extension does not show the raw GET /v1/models payload — it shapes it, and the count you see is lower than the catalog size for two deliberate reasons.

It asks for one id per model

MODELS_CATALOG_PREFIX_MODE defaults to dual, which advertises every model twice — once under the short alias prefix and once under the canonical provider prefix — so older client configs keep resolving either form:

cc/claude-sonnet-4-6        ← alias prefix
claude/claude-sonnet-4-6    ← canonical prefix, same model

The extension requests GET /v1/models?prefix=alias so one id arrives per model, without changing the server-wide setting for your other clients. On a reference instance this collapsed 2345 entries to 1396 — 949 duplicates, zero models lost.

If you would rather fix it server-wide for every client, set the MODELS_CATALOG_PREFIX_MODE feature flag to alias in the dashboard. See API_REFERENCE → prefix for the query parameter and the warning about canonical.

It hides models that cannot chat

The catalog also lists image, video, audio, rerank, embedding and moderation models. Those are rejected on a chat request anyway:

HTTP 400 — Model '<id>' is an image-generation model and cannot be used on
/v1/chat/completions. Use POST /v1/images/generations instead.

so they are filtered out by their type field before reaching the picker. Responses-API models are kept — every Codex / GPT-5.x entry advertises supported_endpoints: ["responses"], and OmniRoute translates those for /v1/chat/completions, so they are perfectly usable.

Providers you never configured

The catalog lists models from providers with an active connection plus every noAuth provider — the keyless ones that make up much of the free tier. That is intentional. To hide them, add them to blockedProviders in the dashboard settings; nothing changes in the extension.

Dashboard inside a VS Code tab

omnicopilot.dashboardOpen: "editor" renders the OmniRoute dashboard in an editor tab via the Simple Browser instead of an external browser. Embedding is opt-in on the server through DASHBOARD_ALLOW_EMBED=vscode, which serves the HTML pages with frame-ancestors 'self' vscode-webview: instead of the default frame-ancestors 'none' + X-Frame-Options: DENY. The API surface (/api, /v1, /v1beta, /a2a, /healthz) keeps the strict headers either way.

⚠️ It is a build-time flag, not a runtime one. Next.js compiles headers() into the route manifest, so next.config.mjs reads the variable while the bundle is built (next.config.mjs → resolveDashboardEmbedMode, scripts/build/dashboardEmbed.mjs). Exporting it in front of an already-built server changes nothing — the headers are baked.

# the variable has to be present on the BUILD command
DASHBOARD_ALLOW_EMBED=vscode npm run build        # or npm run build:release
npm start

Without an embed-enabled build the page refuses to frame, the extension detects that from the response headers and falls back to the external browser — nothing breaks, and it says so once. See ENVIRONMENT.md and issue #10273.

Configuring your other tools from inside VS Code

OmniRoute: Configure Coding CLI drives the omniroute CLI to write ready-to-use profiles for Codex CLI, Claude Code, Cline, Continue, Cursor, Aider, OpenCode, Goose, Crush, Qwen Code, Kilo and Roo — the same configs described in CLI-INTEGRATIONS.md. The API key is handed to the CLI through the OMNIROUTE_API_KEY environment variable, never on the command line.

Troubleshooting

See also

• CLI-INTEGRATIONS.md — every other coding tool
• REMOTE-MODE.md — driving a remote OmniRoute
• ../reference/API_REFERENCE.md — the /v1/models contract
• docs/CATALOG.md — the extension's own catalog notes