Code Personal
A second, separate VS Code for my own work, built from upstream with Copilot and with telemetry off.
I wanted one clear app for work, with work accounts and work AI assistants,
and one for me, with my accounts, my AIs and my own projects. Code Personal
is that second app, fully separate from the first: its own name, executable, data folders, URL protocol and icon. It doesn’t
conflict with code, visual-studio-code-bin or codium and copies nothing
from the work install.
- Upstream, barely touched. It builds the stable release of VS Code OSS with only three upstream inputs customized and no TypeScript or CSS patches. No VSCodium patch set is used.
- Full-featured. Copilot is built from upstream source and bundled. Extensions come from Open VSX with signature verification kept on, through an adapter for Open VSX’s Ed25519 signatures. A Remote SSH extension is bundled, and it only ever downloads its own server.
- Telemetry off by default. VS Code OSS has no Microsoft telemetry
endpoint, but bundled Copilot reports usage to GitHub unless
telemetry.telemetryLevelisoff, so that is the default. You can still opt in. - Built like I’d want a server package built. A pinned Arch container
checks upstream every six hours, builds, verifies identity separation and
the bundled Copilot, launches the app headless, installs a real Open VSX
extension, and insists that a tampered package fails verification. Only
then does it publish an Arch package for CachyOS and a
.deb, the latter test-installed on Ubuntu 24.04.
The builds are traceable, not claimed to be byte-for-byte reproducible.