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Comment by pstuart | Hacker News Reader

Fair enough, but running VSCode on a prod machine is also bananas.

Yes, and now we are full circle: what is (allegedly) bananas is that using VSCode’s remote edit feature has the potentially surprising and unintuitive behavior of installing a VSCode agent on the target machine.

It didn't occur to me when I first read the article, but I do see now the author called it "remote editing" as you did too.

It may be worth more attention though. VSCode is not really remote editing (thick client, thin server binary), it's setting up a development environment (compilers, LSPs, editor extensions, etc.) on a remote thing (VM, container) that you access with a thin VSCode shell.

If you want to quickly edit a config file on a remote machine, TRAMP seems great. VSCode Remote SSH is not meant for that.

agree, but do you think every dev you know konws this?

also "i just want to edit a config file and i want a nice ui", is how you get there.

Expecting vscode to police every single dev using it instead of a company is bananas.

The very first page[1] of the VSCode remote documentation makes it perfectly clear that VSCode remoting is more akin to running an Emacs server on the remote than TRAMP.

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview

Aha, thanks for explaining it in terms I can understand !

Every dev with ssh keys into prod should know it.

The assumption being made is VSCode is not running on the prod machine.

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