Persistent memory for Copilot Chat, Agent, and Workspace via MCP. Same agent, same model, 73% lower premium-request burn on autonomous tasks. Honest about what we don't touch — inline Tab completion stays Microsoft's. Typical sub-millisecond recall. $0 retrieval cost at the local layer.
Copilot Pro+ ships a monthly premium-request quota. Copilot Agent and Workspace burn through it fast — every autonomous task re-reads the same files, re-greps the same patterns, re-discovers your codebase from scratch. By day 17 your dev team is back on the regular tier with the slow model and the apologetic "running low" banner.
Copilot Business at $19/user/mo and Enterprise at $39/user/mo include premium requests too — same dynamic, just bigger budget. The waste compounds with team size.
Same root cause as Cursor, Claude Code, and every other modern coding agent: the agent re-derives your codebase on every turn. Memory layers like Copilot's repo indexing help with retrieval, but they're closed, GitHub-cloud-bound, and don't expose structural facts ("does UserRepository.find_by_email exist?") to the agent's reasoning loop.
Inline Tab completion is the highest-volume token-burning path in Copilot, and Microsoft owns it end-to-end. We're not going to claim otherwise. Where we shine is the autonomous + chat paths — the ones that actually consume your premium-request quota fastest.
Free, no credit card. Sign in with GitHub at app.argosbrain.com, copy the install command, paste it. Then add ArgosBrain to your VSCode MCP config:
curl -fsSL https://argosbrain.com/install.sh | sh && argosbrain init --key <your-free-key> cd ~/my-project argosbrain ingest .
Add this to ~/.vscode/mcp.json (or your repo's .vscode/mcp.json):
{
"servers": {
"argosbrain": {
"command": "argosbrain-mcp",
"args": ["--project", "/Users/you/my-project"]
}
}
}
Restart VSCode. Copilot Chat, Agent, and Workspace now have recall, search, symbol_exists, resolve_member, list_symbols, callers, find_sinks, check_reachability, and 43 other tools — and the agent uses them before re-reading files, because they're faster and free at the local layer.
Switch tools without losing context — the memory lives on your disk, not inside any single editor. Open Copilot for one task, Claude Code for another, both pull from the same brain on the same project.
Average Copilot Pro+ team burns the monthly premium-request quota by day 14-18 on autonomous workloads (PR review, multi-file refactor, security audit, scaffolding). After quota, agent throttles to slower model with apologetic UX.
Inline completions stay full-speed regardless — those don't touch your premium-request quota anyway, they're priced into the base seat.
ArgosBrain ingestion, storage, retrieval — all on your machine. No cloud round-trip from our side. No embedding API call. No telemetry on the code path. The MCP tools we expose to Copilot return file:line citations from your local graph; Copilot then sends those (along with whatever its own indexing already sends) to GitHub/Azure as part of its normal request flow.
If your enterprise policy doesn't allow MCP servers in VSCode, we can't bypass that — talk to GitHub about MCP allowlisting. If your policy DOES allow MCP, ArgosBrain is local-first by definition: nothing about your code goes anywhere we can see.
Turn ArgosBrain off at any time — Copilot falls back to whatever it did before. No lock-in. Solo tier is free; teams pay for support and priority roadmap weight, not for the engine.
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