I built a GitHub Copilot Extension recently that made me unreasonably happy for one major reason: it made my old startup’s app, Brainstory, come back to life, in a very small way!

Now for those who don’t know, I used to work at a company that built AI tools, and I wrote about what we made and why we said goodbye in more detail here.

One of our tools in particular was Brainstory, and it was my favorite of the bunch. It was an app where you could speak out loud with a digital coach, and it used socratic questioning to force you to speak more and get your ideas out. Unlike ChatGPT and other LLM chatbots, it didn’t give answers, it just kept pushing you.

I really love using AI and LLMs for specific use-cases like that, and using it as a thinking tool was so, so helpful for me in producing blog posts, games like Jumblie, apps like W-9 Crafter, and a bunch of conference talks, too. Having a “judgement free” space to literally just verbally get ideas out and pull at threads was perfect for someone like me.

Anyway, I was very sad to see Brainstory go. We open sourced it, but the infrastructure we had set up (particularly with the “live voice to media to prompted text”) was juuust complex enough that I didn’t have the time (nor patience) to stand up my own version of it again.

And then… GitHub released GitHub Copilot Extensions.

Fast forward to this past Fall 2024 as a fresh new GitHub employee. I was poking around with the Extensions documentation, seeing what possibilities there were with it, not fully sure why someone would extend Copilot unless you wanted it to call some kind of external API (or make it talk like some kind of funny character in all of its responses).

And then I realized… all of the tools I needed for a Brainstory clone were suddenly available to me: VS Code had a Speech Extension that let me verbally dictate what I wanted into the editor. Copilot Extensions and Chat let me query an LLM API with a prompt and get a response. The editor itself was a UI I didn’t have to maintain!

Y’all, I hacked together something that was so, so messy. But, within an hour, my brainstorming buddy extension was working. I slowly said into my IDE, “I’d like to plan out a blog post around [a topic], but I’m not sure how I want to structure it.”

I fully felt like Dr. Frankenstein shouting, “IT’S ALIIIIIIIVE!” when it responded back!! It felt like it was an old friend responding to me and I was able to fully outline my post I wanted to write while just talking it out.

This post definitely sounds like I’m trying to shill Copilot, I’m fully aware, but it’s really not about that: There’s a lot of tools that become a part of our workflows and day-to-days, and when they die off for whatever reason, it’s a real bummer to not have an alternative at the ready if it doesn’t exist. Startups like Polywork and Stashpad (that I genuinely really liked!) recently announced shutdowns and I’m already trying to think about how I’ll replace their functionality in my regular work.

Being able to find alternatives is one thing, but for the really specific tools, being able to hack something together yourself can be arduous. It’s really, really awesome (and empowering) when it’s made a bit easier and faster.

Anyway, that’s all, and I’ll write more about how to build a Copilot Extension at some point in case you want to do something similar! One last note, check out this similar post called “File over app” by Steph Ango when you can, I think it articulates what I mean here pretty well. Smell ya later!