El Bruno

⚠️ This blog post was created with the help of AI tools. Yes, I used a bit of magic from language models to organize my thoughts and automate the boring parts, but the geeky fun and the 🤖 in C# are 100% mine.

One of the most interesting announcements in the recent VS Code 1.122 release is that Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) models can now be used without signing in to GitHub. VS Code now supports BYOK scenarios, including chat, tools, and MCP integrations, without requiring GitHub authentication, making enterprise, offline, and air-gapped workflows much easier to support.

I originally came across this update thanks to a tweet from Pierce Boggan:

VS Code gives you:

1. SOTA models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini
2. BYOK for any model not natively supported in the product (and works w/o login!)
3. Harness choice with VS Code, Copilot CLI, Copilot cloud agent, and 3p harnesses like Claude/Codex

Developer choice ftw! https://t.co/mm7n1owQK5

— Pierce Boggan (@pierceboggan) May 30, 2026

This immediately caught my attention because it connects directly with the experiments I’ve been running around GitHub Copilot CLI, local models, BYOK, SQUAD, and AI-assisted software engineering.

Quick recap:

CPU-only local models
Slow, useful mostly for questions and tiny tasks.
https://elbruno.com/2026/05/03/running-github-copilot-cli-offline-with-local-models-a-cpu-only-reality-check/

GPU local models
Faster, with more room for local agent experiments.
https://elbruno.com/2026/05/06/running-github-copilot-cli-offline-with-local-models-gpu-edition/

GPT-5-mini BYOK
Capable, but stabilization, quality gates, and validation became the real work.
https://elbruno.com/2026/05/11/github-copilot-cli-gpt-5-mini-byok-the-code-was-cheap-the-quality-gates-were-expensive/

GPT-5.5 BYOK
The most disciplined run so far, with better phase control, quality gates, and manual UX validation.
https://elbruno.com/2026/05/14/github-copilot-cli-squad-gpt-5-5-byok-better-engineering-same-hard-truth/

The new VS Code 1.122 BYOK flow feels like a natural next step for this series.

I haven’t rerun the ElBruno.NetAgent experiment with this new capability yet, but it is definitely on my list.

The lesson remains the same:

The code keeps getting cheaper. Validation and engineering discipline are still expensive.