Breaking Copilot in VSCode?

[bocan]

I spent a silly 3 hours thinking my VSCode / Copilot was broken this evening. I uninstalled everything, tried downgrading, reinstalling extensions, testing my network and even wiping my entire configuration.

The context: It eventually dawned on me that it worked with any other repo. But I kept opening code from within Cog - and Copilot would log out, and wouldn't let me log in. Nor Claude. Once I realised that I looked in .vscode/ at launch.json and spotted this:

"configurations": [
    {
        "name": "Debug Local File",
        "type": "Ruby",
        "request": "launch",
        "program": "${workspaceRoot}/Scripts/update_feed.rb"
    },
    null
]

There's a literal null sitting in the configurations array. VS Code iterates over that array, tries to read .name from each entry, hits null, and blows up with exactly the error I've been seeing: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'name').

That crash in the extension host cascades and takes down the GitHub authentication provider with it, which is why it looked like an auth problem but was actually a workspace config issue torpedoing the entire extension host process on startup.

The fix is just removing that trailing null:

{
    "version": "0.2.0",
    "configurations": [
        {
            "name": "Debug Local File",
            "type": "Ruby",
            "request": "launch",
            "program": "${workspaceRoot}/Scripts/update_feed.rb"
        }
    ]
}

[bocan]

For what it's worth, I raised a bug agaist VSCode for this, with a PR to fix their parsing. It was merged this morning and should appear in version 1.117.0.

My PR for Cog - with the "Mini Player Plus" also has the fix for the launch.json file in Cog, so if anything, that might something useful to cherry pick.