vscode interactive.instructions.md

Architecture notes for the interactive window in Visual Studio Code. An interactive window lets an extension provide a read-eval-print loop (REPL), where users enter code and see results.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when working on the interactive window, notebook controllers, code completion, input editors, or execution-result display.
Why use it?
It explains which parts Visual Studio Code provides and which parts an extension must supply, reducing confusion when changing this component.

Instructions file for GitHub Copilot

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add instructions/microsoft/vscode/interactive
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode

Made for: GitHub Copilot.

Per session 938 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 938 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00938 $0.00938
Opus 5 $0.00469 $0.00469
Sonnet 5 $0.00188 $0.00188
Haiku 4.5 $0.00094 $0.00094

Measured yesterday against content hash 26ddeb782fd4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vscode interactive.instructions.md scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

.github/instructions/interactive.instructions.md · 51 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 51 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Interactive Window

The interactive window component enables extensions to offer REPL like experience to its users. VS Code provides the user interface and extensions provide the execution environment, code completions, execution results rendering and so on.

The interactive window consists of notebook editor at the top and regular monaco editor at the bottom of the viewport. Extensions can extend the interactive window by leveraging the notebook editor API and text editor/document APIs:

  • Extensions register notebook controllers for the notebook document in the interactive window through vscode.notebooks.createNotebookController. The notebook document has a special notebook view type interactive, which is contributed by the core instead of extensions. The registered notebook controller is responsible for execution.
  • Extensions register auto complete provider for the bottom text editor through vscode.languages.registerCompletionItemProvider. The resource scheme for the text editor is interactive-input and the language used in the editor is determined by the notebook controller contributed by extensions.

Users can type in code in the text editor and after users pressing Shift+Enter, we will insert a new code cell into the notebook document with the content from the text editor. Then we will request execution for the newly inserted cell. The notebook controller will handle the execution just like it's in a normal notebook editor.

Interactive Window Registration

Registering a new editor type in the workbench consists of two steps:

  • Register an editor input factory which is responsible for resolving resources with given glob patterns. Here we register an InteractiveEditorInput for all resources with vscode-interactive scheme.
  • Register an editor pane factory for the given editor input type. Here we register InteractiveEditor for our own editor input InteractiveEditorInput.

The workbench editor service is not aware of how models are resolved in EditorInput, neither how EditorPanes are rendered. It only cares about the common states and events on EditorInput or EditorPane, i.e., display name, capabilities (editable), content change, dirty state change. It's EditorInput/EditorPane's responsibility to provide the right info and updates to the editor service. One major difference between Interactive Editor and other editor panes is Interactive Window is never dirty so users never see a dot on the editor title bar.

Read the full file on GitHub · 51 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 51 lines · 938 tokens per session scan A 26ddeb782fd4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vscode interactive.instructions.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository microsoft/vscode (190,061 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 938 tokens to every session, about $0.0047 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.