Everyone is reading this as intentional anti-competitive practices. While that may be true, isn't another reasonable explanation that the Copilot development team is moving as fast as they can and these sorts of workarounds are being forced through in the name of team velocity? It takes a lot more time/energy to push public APIs and it's probably a very different team than the team developing the copilot extension. Seems a bit like a "don't attribute to malice..." kind of moment to me
Very interestingly, just yesterday I discovered that VSCode has a set of APIs for adding SSH tunneling, and under normal circumstances you must launch vscode with special flags to be able to use them. Somehow their built-in JavaScript debugging extension can use these APIs without any issues.<p><a href="https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/src/vscode-dts/vscode.proposed.tunnels.d.ts">https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/src/vscode-dts...</a><p>And you can hardly find any public information about these APIs. Well, unless someone asks -- As of 2 years ago, they didn't have any plans to "finalize" these APIs, i.e. make them public. You are advised to find other workarounds (which do work).<p><a href="https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-discussions/discussions/174">https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-discussions/discussions/...</a><p>This is much less "harmful" than Copilot though, I guess.
It's felt for a long time to me that MS has been slowly boiling the frog with VSCode - injecting little bits of proprietary/non open source functionality at a time. I want to switch to something else but the community at large for the languages I develop in is pretty centered on VS code (Rust and Typescript mostly), and it's a <i>really</i> good editor. Obviously not helped by Typescript being stewarded by MS too.
I really don't get why people are mad about this. I get it, people don't like MS but theres really no surprises here, nor is it really all that bad. They put time, effort and money into developing VSCode. Its open source so if you want to use these API's you can in a forked version. And of course if you're developing something thats free for everyone to use, and its not forcing you to use it, I don't see an issue with using private API's.<p>And while some make the alegory to IE its not the same since its not pre-installed on every machine, nor are they forcing you to use it. So while yes they have a lot of market share, they have nothing stopping you from forking it yourself or just using a different editor.
After doing some VS Code extension development, I don't really understand what this could enable that isn't already possible. You can run arbitrary code on the client side from a VS Code extension, you can run a full web application inside the VS Code UI, you can read and change developers' files in any way you want.<p>What is Cursor doing that they couldn't do as an extension?
Seems pretty common that a platforms owner would actually try new apis with their own stuff.<p>What better way to get primary real world usage before stabilizing?
I don’t see any problem here. They spend money, effort, time to develop their products. Why do they need to give that products for free to everyone, or even their competitors?<p>Others can choose to use or not use vscode. If they concern about the telemetry, build themselves or use other code editor then.
I don't necessarily see anything particularly malicious to be honest.<p>Before you introduce public APIs you need a use case and someone to spearhead them and copilot is doing that.<p>As for Microsoft not allowing installs of stuff like live share on other forks I guess it is because they are seen as different products and not part of the vsc codebase itself.<p>I would understand if extension authors would complain about not being able to access the same apis (might be the case) but at the end of the day they can still fork and do whatever they prefer.<p>Lots of companies out there thrive on forking vsc, from gitpod, stackblitz, cursor and many others. But they can't possibly expect to have all proprietary plugins too.<p>What other code editor has ever been so impactful and open in the last decades?
Huh, I assumed that MS Live Share and GH Copilot extensions were already using some secret APIs in the past, since I never saw any open source extension being able to do what they do. I guess I was wrong before, and this only starts being the case now?
Extend to Extinguish - Round 3. [0][1]<p>VS Code + GitHub + OpenAI exclusivity deals + Copilot = The best tools available for close to free.<p>To use the latest features they will only be found on MS branded tools like the ones above.<p>With the competition getting eliminated with total MS coverage of the developer ecosystem with almost everyone sitting on GitHub using VSCode and OpenAI.<p>Monopoly with close to no competition all without any regulatory scrutiny has been achieved internally. With the extending being the extinguish.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38280513">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38280513</a><p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612959">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612959</a>
This seems like a good time to mention Zed. Recent discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40928893">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40928893</a>
I suppose this is somewhat related to previous discussion[1], Microsoft has shown it's true color for multiple times, why even bother trusting them?<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41691577">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41691577</a>
To everyone talking about EEE, what can they extinguish here, code editors?<p>If they get too annoying, like really forcing copilot or something like that, there are several other editors to choose from. Until this day comes I'm having a positive experience with VSC.
"Hidden APIs" is clickbait; VS Code is open source. Unless they're saying the published VS Code binaries are somehow altered to offer the APIs that are not otherwise available in the open source repository (which is not the case).
Microsoft seems to have most fooled with vscode.. The only other IDE’s worth touching imo are Jetbrains and they have most likely been hit by the fact vscode costs $0 and is “good enough”.<p>Microsoft has already made it difficulty to compete with their “free” by giving away enough and locking down parts that would allow competition to easily fork it (Python LSP, Extensions marketplace).<p>Vim and Emacs seem to be thriving but I wouldn’t call them drop in replacements.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the miracle called Lazyvim (terminal based IDE). Once you go lazy, you don’t come back. I can’t stand vs code now. The mouse even works in Lazyvim.
Not sure why this is a problem.<p>VS Code doesn't have a lock on market share for IDEs the way say Google does on search.<p>There are plenty of other options either with or without CoPilot.
I honestly don't see the issue here (Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft, but in professional services, not in product - and nevertheless fully expect to be downvoted to oblivion).<p>If these aren't finished, that most likely means that they still haven't stabilized enough to go through the full support and release pipeline--that usually means documenting them, publishing a couple of reference development samples, doing a public announcement, i.e., the full nine yards of fostering adoption of the product feature.<p>Which you typically will only do once the "preview" is stable and flexible enough to pass muster.<p>I mean, it's not as if there isn't a huge API surface for the editor (the sample extensions repo is huge - <a href="https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-extension-samples">https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-extension-samples</a>), and there are already samples out there to extend the Copilot functionality: <a href="https://github.com/joyceerhl/vscode-mssql-chat">https://github.com/joyceerhl/vscode-mssql-chat</a> (I wrote my own based off this one for a personal project)<p>So maybe consider that those things just take time to build out fully before assuming the worst?
There are comments questioning whether this is a malicious practice or not, I remind you that we are talking about Microsoft, they have always taken the ‘Embrace, extend, and extinguish’ approach.
There are just certain technologies my brain says "fuck, no" to. GNOME. The Great Banality Laser (whose official name was once Twitter). Visual Studio Code.<p>The fullness of time usually proves my brain's initial impressions right, as it seems to be doing now with Visual Studio Code.<p>I can still remember the monthly paroxysm of bliss that radiated throughout Hackernews, regular as clockwork, timed with Microsoft's monthly VS Code drops. Glad to see it enter its trough of disillusionment, at least on Hackernews.