I did more experimentation with Visual Studio Code today and the free Copilot Github and Cogent extensions.

Copilot Github interfaces with the Github site Copilot feature which offers a free version. I also got the Cogent extension which acts as an agent for Copilot and can do multiple tasks and requests such as feeding it more files and can edit files in your workspace for you. At least that’s what I think so far and why I got Cogent.

My first problem was that I needed to figure out how to log in to Github Copilot to be able to use that extension in VS Code. I tackled that issue by asking Copilot in my browser how I could do that. It walked me through the commands and instructions to log in. It took me a couple tries beccause I hadn’t actually enabled Github Copilot in my Github account so I had to do that first.

My next problem was that I kept getting a cryptic error when trying to follow the instructions to use Cogent. Something about a 400 error with a model not being available. I ended up trying a few things and failed before I simply asked GitHub Copilot what to do. It presented me with a button to ENABLE the Claude Sonnet 3.5 model for all extensions. That did the trick.

However, I decided to just simply try some things with the Github Copilot extension first before trying to extend it with Cogent.

I told it I wanted to create an Access database to create RubberDuckVBA Unit tests to do the popular code kata FizzBuzz.

It walked me through creating an Access db (but didn’t do it for me) and gave me the code, but told me to create the module and copy and paste it in myself. Eh, I don’t need to be using VS Code to do any of this…

So I switched gears and asked it if it could create the VBA file and allow me to use OASIS SVN to import it via the command line. It said I could do this, although after some research this was simply a hallucination. OASIS SVN does not seem to have a command line utility to run commands, although Copilot produced some really nice looking commands for me to try.

At this point I stopped. I think what I need to do to make using VS Code possible is to figure out some sort of workflow for creating files and then having them imported into an Access database all from VS Code. So, more to come as I continue my adventure.