[Community Initiative] Help get VS Code Pet to recognize Tabby and open-source agents!

Hello Tabby team and community!

Note: This is not a bug report for Tabby, but a community initiative to improve VS Code's native support for open-source AI agents.

Context

VS Code recently introduced an experimental interactive "pet" companion that sits above the chat input and reacts to AI agent activity. It's a fun, engaging feature, but currently, it only reacts to GitHub Copilot.

I opened a feature request in the official VS Code repository to ask them to extend this compatibility to powerful open-source agents like Tabby, Cline, Kilo Code, and others.

Why this matters for Tabby

As a fully open-source, self-hosted alternative to GitHub Copilot, Tabby represents the values of transparency, privacy, and community-driven development. Getting the VS Code pet to recognize Tabby would:

• Validate Tabby as a first-class AI coding assistant alongside Copilot
• Provide better UX for Tabby users in VS Code
• Demonstrate that self-hosted, open-source solutions deserve equal recognition
• Show that the community values alternatives to proprietary AI tools

The Goal

The VS Code team requires 20 upvotes () on the issue within 60 days to keep it in their backlog. If it doesn't reach this threshold, the issue will be automatically closed.

How you can help (takes 5 seconds)

If you support this idea, please go to the VS Code issue and drop a reaction on the very first post (the description).

Important: Comments like "+1" do NOT count for the VS Code automation bot. Only the emoji reaction on the main post works!

Link to upvote: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/335649

Thank you for building such an important open-source alternative, and thank you for your support!