Easily Remove AI Features from VS Code

I pulled all of my hair out trying to figure out how to turn off and remove all of the AI tools from Visual Studio Code. It turns out the solution was very easy! Let's record the solution here.

This solution comes from a Stack Overflow answer. Of course the AI-generated answer on Google at this time awkwardly mixes advice from across the years and ends up useless. It takes time to read and cognitive resources to determine its uselessness. In that sense, it is worse than useless. This frustrating thing exemplifies the main reason I no longer employ AI assistance when coding and why I wanted to remove all presence of AI and Copilot features from Visual Studio Code.

Alright, down to business and then I'll rant more, surely. It is just one setting! The setting is called chat.disableAIFeatures and the very easy way to get to it is by typing the command "Chat: Learn How to Hide AI Features" in the command bar (on VS Code for Windows I just press the '>' key to get there).

Then toggle the setting, confirm you are certain (maybe it will disable extensions), and that's it!

I promise this command-to-setting process is much, much easier than the other path I attempted before stumbling on this solution. I was disabling extensions individually, searching through settings to disable features individually, frustrated that so many are permanently locked on as "enabled". I was sent to GitHub to try to find more settings, try to disable things by disconnecting as much AI as possible from there. It was not fun or very fruitful, I'll tell ya!

Whew, it is all gone now. No more seeing constant irritants that try to push me to use a rapidly-mutating suite of anti-productivity tools that appear to be getting ever-more monetized, marketed, abstractly tangled with the cloud, and frustrating.

Yay now surely only happy days are ahead.

<3 Grant