VS Code を開くと勝手に出てくる Copilot Chat を止める This article explains how to disable GitHub Copilot Chat from automatically opening every …

Visual Studio Code's tight integration with GitHub Copilot has made AI assistance a default part of the editing experience, but that convenience comes with a side effect some developers find distracting: the Copilot Chat panel frequently opens by itself as soon as the editor launches. This matters because unexpected panels reduce the space available for code, add visual noise, and can pull focus away from the task at hand, especially for people who use chat only occasionally.

The behavior stems from how recent VS Code versions treat chat as a first-class surface. Copilot Chat now lives in its own view, and in newer builds it has been moved into the secondary side bar, sometimes called the auxiliary bar, on the right side of the window. VS Code also restores your previous workbench layout when it starts, so if the chat view was visible when you last closed the application, it will typically reappear. In some cases the extension itself requests that its view be shown, which reinforces the impression that the panel opens on its own.

The simplest remedy is to close the panel and let VS Code remember the change. Toggling the secondary side bar with the View menu or the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Alt+B on Windows and Linux, or Cmd+Alt+B on macOS) hides the area that hosts chat, and the editor should preserve that state across restarts. If the panel keeps returning, layout persistence may be the culprit rather than Copilot itself.

For a more deterministic result, the Settings interface offers finer control. Opening Settings (Ctrl+, or Cmd+,) and searching for terms such as "secondary side bar" or "chat" surfaces the relevant options. A setting along the lines of workbench.secondarySideBar.defaultVisibility, when set to hidden, is intended to keep that bar collapsed by default. These values can also be edited directly in settings.json, which is useful if you want to sync the configuration across machines through Settings Sync. Because the exact names and defaults have shifted between releases as the chat UI evolves, it is worth confirming the current option in your installed version rather than assuming a fixed key.

Users who want to remove chat prompts from the title bar can additionally look at the command center. A setting such as chat.commandCenter.enabled controls whether a chat entry appears in that central area, and disabling it declutters the top of the window without turning off Copilot entirely. For those who want to go further, the Copilot and Copilot Chat extensions can be disabled per workspace, so a specific project opens without any AI surfaces while other projects keep them enabled.

It helps to understand the broader context. Over the past several releases, GitHub and Microsoft have steadily promoted chat from an optional add-on to a central pillar of the editor, adding inline chat, an agent mode capable of multi-step edits, and deeper integration with the command palette and editor gutter. GitHub has also open-sourced the Copilot Chat extension, signaling that the interface will continue to change quickly. That momentum likely explains why default beha