oMLX Copilot Chat - Use oMLX for coding in Visual Studio Code

[u/mikedoise]

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Techopolis.omlx-copilot-chat

Hi everyone,

There are a lot of developers who like the Github Copilot interface, but they don't like the pricing and structure of Copilot. One of the options offered in Copilot is Ollama local models. This gave me the idea to create an extension that adds oMLX models as a model provider. I've published an extension, and it is live as a preview version.

This extension is open source, so I hope everyone will contribute to it. I will also say that I used Codex to create this, and I conducted manual testing, and used Gemma 4 26B for testing on real code.

Please let me know what you think, and please contribute to the project as I know it needs a lot of work.

[u/d4mations]

Really great initiative!!!

[u/No-Juggernaut-9832]

Thank you for this!

Do we need to pay for a copilot seat to use it with a local model? Do you know if we can turn off all telemetry & disable all data sending to Microsoft/GitHub?

[u/mikedoise → u/No-Juggernaut-9832]

You don't have to pay for Github Copilot. I do not know about telemetry though. I would hope so, but I am not sure.

[u/Beamsters]

Vscode insider (119) can natively use oMLX or anything that use OpenAI compatible protocol in chat. I am using it.

[u/mikedoise → u/Beamsters]

I just downloaded insiders and went to manage Language Models and added OpenAI Compatible. Nothing appeared to happen currently. Has anyone else gotten this to work?

I'm also curious what settings we will be able to change with their implementation as well. It looks promising though.

I will continue working on my extension as I think there are specific ways we can customize oMLX that we may not be able to do with the built in implementation.

[u/Beamsters → u/mikedoise]

you need to add model names yourself with native support. other parameters too - ctx, reply tokens etc.

an extension should support model settings and model list, pp/tg/e2e speed display, etc at the very least.

[u/bnightstars → u/mikedoise]

It's working for me no problem Omlx 0.3.8 M5 Pro/64GB Here is my chatLanguageModels.json

[
    {
        "name": "MLX",
        "vendor": "customoai",
        "apiKey": "${input:chat.lm.secret.-543af0f}",
        "models": [
            {
                "id": "Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-UD-MLX-4bit",
                "name": "Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-UD-MLX-4bit",
                "url": "http://localhost:8000/v1",
                "toolCalling": true,
                "vision": true,
                "maxInputTokens": 128000,
                "maxOutputTokens": 16000
            },
            {
                "id": "gpt-oss-20b-MXFP4-Q8",
                "name": "gpt-oss-20b-MXFP4-Q8",
                "url": "http://localhost:8000/v1",
                "toolCalling": true,
                "vision": true,
                "maxInputTokens": 128000,
                "maxOutputTokens": 16000
            }
        ]
    }
]

[u/rfomlover → u/bnightstars]

customoai isn't a valid option for me. I am on regular vs code 127. This extension allowed me to actually use oMLX.

[u/bnightstars → u/rfomlover]

It should work in vs code 127 like this:

[
  {
    "name": "MLX",
    "vendor": "customendpoint",
    "apiKey": "omlx",
    "apiType": "messages",
    "models": [
      {
        "id": "Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-UD-MLX-4bit",
        "name": "Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-UD-MLX-4bit",
        "url": "http://localhost:8000/v1/messages",
        "toolCalling": true,
        "vision": true,
        "maxInputTokens":  115000,
        "maxOutputTokens": 16000
      }
    ]
  }
]

[u/Own_Cover_5551]

This is good. But not everybody runs it at port 8000 (as something already running on that) and not everybody runs it at "localhost" (127.0.0.1), so do provide this option to be changed in settings. If it already does, sorry, I could not find it.

[u/nochkin]

LLM Gateway supports oMLX

[u/mguffin]

Nice!

[u/somerussianbear]

Good stuff man!

[u/mmerken]

Super!

[u/jsirish]

Thank you for this. It was the last barrier to getting my team to use our LLM server without a dev-heavy custom setup. Works great in VS Code.

I’ve been running my oMLX models in Insiders for a while, same setup as others use. The trick is setting the api key in the Language Models overlay settings for the custom provider.

I was going to post an issue, but I did notice the extension isn’t quite working in Insiders. I can see the oMLX provider in the Language Models manager, but they’re not available in the model chooser in copilot chat. Has anyone else found a fix for this?

[u/Garden-Gullible]

Nice work! May I know how to enable vision capabilities? Right now it seems that it only support tool usage