Fixing VSCode Ghost Text 👻

Uninstall (don’t just disable) Codeium from your VSCode extensions if Copilot inline suggestions aren’t working

As an employee of Morehouse School of Medicine in a research-related position, I qualify for GitHub Education, which in turn gave me free access to GitHub Copilot. I happily used this for a month or so, but was intrigued by Codeium, another VSCode extension that assisted with AI generated, context aware inline suggestions. Though I appreciated the free access, Codeium offered a free tier for all, and I like the idea of marketplace competition, so I started using that regularly instead of Copilot. Fast forward to this month, when GitHub announced its early Christmas present of a free tier for everyone on Copilot!

Deciding it had been enough time (and also on the heels of GitHub Universe where they announced a ton of new features trying to keep up with Cursor), I reinstalled Copilot and disabled Codeium, excited to see how it had improved. Disappointingly, the inline autocomplete was not working. I tweaked settings, refreshed, reinstalled, and searched Stack Overflow. I even ironically asked the in-editor chat window why it wasn't working, but never was able to isolate the issue or find the magic setting that was breaking it.

Finally, I decided to fully uninstall Codeium (whereas I had just disabled it previously) and voilà! Auto-suggestions are working! I'll report back after more use, but my initial impression is that Codeium's are more helpful. The next step is probably trying one of the AI-focused VSCode forks: Cursor or Windsurf which is Codeium's integrated editor.

Let me know in the comments what that magical setting was that was fixed when Codeium was uninstalled. And if you have opinions on Windsurf vs. Cursor let me know!​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​