Allow to hide Copilot via user setting and policy

[adalisk-emikhaylov]

Does this issue occur when all extensions are disabled?: Yes

• VS Code Version: 1.100.2
• OS Version: Ubuntu 22.04.5

Currently to disable Copilot you need to click CtrlShiftP -> Hide Copilot.

I was expecting it to set a flag in settings.json so that I don't have to repeat this on every new machine, but alas the flag is stored somewhere else.

This is inconsistent with how most other settings are managed.

[dmalan]

Just to chime in as well, I'm afraid this latest incarnation of Copilot within VS Code and, in turn, GitHub Codespaces, without the GitHub Copilot extension even installed, has become a significant problem educationally already. In @cs50, for instance, we don't allow students to use any AI-based tools other than the course's own (i.e., cs50.dev, which is built atop Codespaces, and cs50.ai, which is built atop Azure OpenAI Service). We enforce that administratively through policy and technologically by forcibly uninstalling the extension if installed.

As in the screenshot below, though, VS Code itself now encourages students to engage with Copilot, both in new editors and in the status bar, and we indeed don't seem to have the ability to disable those features. Is the addition of a enable/disable setting something that could be prioritized? We ourselves have received quite a few concerned notes from K12 teachers especially.

Pedagogically, we ourselves only allow and encourage students to use tools like Copilot at course's end, once they've developed an intuition and muscle memory for certain fundamentals. (Cf. this paper.)

Thank you!

[bpasero]

Initial work started in #251110

Lots of ongoing discussions (with @eli-w-king @bamurtaugh, @cwebster-99, @bhavyaus) and no clear outcome, to summarise:

• if we introduce a setting, it should be configurable by policy as well
• if its configured by policy, should we then leave a bit of Copilot UI around so that the user learns it has been disabled by policy and so you need to reach out to admins to enable it
• if its disabled by the user, should we preserve the 🤖 icon in the title bar to have a consistent way of bringing it back (it can still be hidden via right click)
• how does this setting work when Copilot is already installed as extension, will it simply be ignored