Why Did Microsoft Build VSCode? Turns Out, GitHub Copilot

Indeed a by product of the design ensures that Copilot does not work on oss (vscode mit) which other cloud development vendors which compete that codespaces uses but the problem is much wider.

For example dotnet tooling, pylance, etc. Most of the popular programming languages where microsoft is the primary maintainer of lsp/editor tooling by design is not open.

I'd argue that MS has been on a very different trajectory since the "Linux is a cancer" Ballmer days, and open source is a big part of that movement. I never thought I'd see them buy and open source Xamarin, or open source the entire C# compiler and .NET Framework. It's worked well for them - .NET is being actively developed by many volunteers as well as the core MS team, and performance has improved significantly in the last few years. There are a lot of associated technologies being developed in the open, too, like Terminal, the C# language itself and so on. I find it difficult to think that this was all a grand plan to extract more revenue out of devs. Rather, I think MS realised that it was instead a "rising tide lifts all boats" situation, whereby bringing more devs into the fold - including those on Linux and Mac - would be mutually beneficial. Let's not forget, Visual Studio Community Edition wasn't around until relatively recently. The only legal way to get Visual Studio was to fork out for a Pro or Enterprise licence.

As for AI integration into VS Code, I share kaelini's opinion that the chat feature is still new and possibly very alpha (it's certainly not very fast at the moment), so that's probably why it's not all been open sourced. But, of course, MS is perfectly within their rights to release closed-source extensions to the VS Code marketplace - the new C# Dev Kit is a case in point here.

This is beside the main point of the article, but: as a developer, it's true telemetry is critical for building a good product. Knowing which parts of your app are underutilized or need improvement is extremely important - without hard data, you're basing your project on a hunch. However, telemetry is worth zero in and of itself.

If the article author thinks Microsoft is magically turning their VSCode latency data and error stacktraces into metric tons of cash money, they're probably mistaken.

I don't think that in 2015 MS had known the AI explosion of the last months, at such degree to base a whole product strategy

> Without knowing it, Microsoft built VSCode for GitHub Copilot.

I really hate articles that bait and switch the premise on you, so I stopped there. The thrust of the title and the introductory text seems to indicate that the author has discovered another undisclosed reason for building VS Code.

EDIT: The article doesn't actually contend what the title suggests it does. So nevermind I guess.

Also, when I open a file from “search for references” results, the newly opened file does not appear in my recently-opened list. So I can’t switch back and forth to it.

https://www.johnpapa.net/visual-studio-code/

As for msft, it's the classic case of company short sightedness here : msft has been slowly building a good reputation around OSS which foster trust and adoption by the wider community. And they are trading all of this good will for a market which is not even mature yet.

The author is trying to pull the wool over his readers' eyes. This is NOT the main landing page for either VSCode or VisualStudio. Those are https://code.visualstudio.com/ and https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/, respectively. Copilot doesn't make any sort of appearance on either page.

They already have a official copilot plugin for intellij. I really hope they add copilot x support because I'm not moving to vscode for that.

How could the github guy sell that platform to M$! On their LinkedIn platform they force C# jobs on you instead of, in my case, Go, what I searched for. You search for Go, you get C# results, if you're logged in.

Why am I being so dramatic, because it has been going on since day 1. TCPA, now TPM, forced on you if you want to use their latest OS. Their browser sending images you view to them. Telemetry, who knows what kind, that you can't turn off. Copilot that steals other people work they published in good faith. And they have their hands everywhere.

Aren't you tired of this kind of unreality, dystopia tbh. I am. I'm tired of not just Microsoft spying and abusing me but also Google and most of all the 3 letter word agencies in the US. Just an hour ago I was locked out of Github because they're forcing 2FA on me. Screw them. I'd rather not have a Github account than being forced to do 2FA. I've been on the net since 1995, not a single hacked account. I'm just fucking done. Microsoft is my new #1 enemy, again.

Otherwise, it seems to me that assigning malice isn't justified. It's surely a fast-moving/evolving feature which was added recently, and stabilizing the API for general use means they have to support it in that form ad infinitum. Sure, it would be ideal if they committed to that from the beginning, but I can understand the schedule pressure and priorities.