How Visual Studio’s New Code Citation Feature Boosts Copilot Transparency

On February 20, Microsoft announced that Visual Studio now supports code citations for GitHub Copilot completions.

The code citation feature enables developers to verify whether suggestions from Copilot are based on public code, which can raise open‑source licensing issues depending on how the code is used.

Microsoft product manager Simona Liao wrote in a blog post: “By integrating code citations into GitHub Copilot, we are fostering a culture of knowledge sharing and transparency. The feature empowers individual developers and also helps larger teams navigate the complexities of public code.”

When developers accept a suggestion that matches code in a public GitHub repository, they receive a notification showing the match, including license information and a link to the repository where the code was found.

Microsoft notes that less than 1% of Copilot completions match public code (the figure is likely higher when working in open‑source repositories), so developers will not see citations for most completions.

According to Microsoft, code citations run only on the suggestions accepted by Copilot, not on code written by the developer.

The feature was previously introduced in Copilot Chat and is now available directly in Visual Studio.

“This new feature provides developers with greater transparency about any public code matches found, increasing code completion (or ‘gray text’) visibility. Prior to this change, public code match completions were automatically suppressed.”

Now developers can choose to view more code completions and obtain sufficient information about any public code matches, enabling them to make informed decisions,” Liao wrote.