from Hacker News

Why Did Microsoft Build VSCode? Turns Out, GitHub Copilot

by varunkmohan on 6/14/23, 5:29 PM with 42 comments

  • by ghuntley on 6/14/23, 7:05 PM

    Visual Studio Code (and ecosystem) isn’t opensource and closed by design not because of copilot. It’s to enable a wider plan involving GitHub codespaces aka Visual Studio Online (do a nslookup of the cname on a codespaces workspace btw) - see https://ghuntley.com/fracture

    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.

  • by djray on 6/15/23, 2:09 PM

    A lot of conspiracy talk here, backed up with nothing other than a note that the AI chat API isn't public yet.

    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.

  • by aloe_falsa on 6/14/23, 7:13 PM

    > What does Microsoft really get? Maybe in the beginning, telemetry was the real answer, from whichever developers didn’t opt out.

    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.

  • by ElSinchi on 6/14/23, 5:45 PM

    Seems very conspiracy

    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

  • by deafpolygon on 6/14/23, 6:12 PM

    > What does Microsoft really get? Maybe in the beginning, telemetry was the real answer, from whichever developers didn’t opt out. But it turns out even Microsoft didn’t see the answer coming.

    > 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.

  • by TechBro8615 on 6/14/23, 7:24 PM

    I'm pretty sure they just looked at where developers spend their time and invested everywhere they could. They want to own the development experience. Microsoft built VSCode before OpenAI or the transformers paper even existed. It seems clear that the motive was detached from any kind of overly specific AI product direction.

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

  • by acchow on 6/14/23, 7:48 PM

    VSCode is painful to use. I don’t get why, when I do a “search for references” that my previous “search for references” tab gets destroyed.

    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.

  • by mandeepj on 6/14/23, 6:50 PM

    I don't know what could be other scoop on it, but VS Code was John Papa's initiative (in his own words). He did a podcast on it as well; checkout it out at DotNetRocks.com

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

  • by soulbadguy on 6/14/23, 8:40 PM

    We have been here before and probably will again. Companies are not for or against OSS, it's just a tool for maximizing whatever their mission are. And that includes codeium too. Right now, it is in codeium interest to push for OSS so they do so, and MSFT to try to protect github copilot advantage so they do so. Give it a couple of years and codeium will be doing the same game (is they survive that long), same as reddit, stack overflow etc... etc...

    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.

  • by rat87 on 6/14/23, 7:24 PM

    I'm pretty sure the real reason Microsoft released VSCode is because they had already written a lot of the code for their online text editor widget and needed a Linux/Mac editor to increase C# and especially typescript popularity
  • by nateb2022 on 6/16/23, 4:39 PM

    > You don’t believe me yet? Just look at the VisualStudio home page: (https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/)

    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.

  • by thewataccount on 6/14/23, 8:15 PM

    I'm not going to use VSCode just got github copilot x. I've tried it, but its not worth using vscode over intellij.

    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.

  • by lakomen on 6/14/23, 9:17 PM

    Microsoft is the devil. I'm sorry, but from "the beginning of time" that company has sought nothing but a complete monopoly.

    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.

  • by 2OEH8eoCRo0 on 6/14/23, 7:15 PM

    I think they expected to buy GitHub, a competitor, or build their own alternative repository host and VS Code was the "browser" for that.
  • by znpy on 6/14/23, 6:22 PM

    Embrace, extend, extinguish… once again.
  • by kaelinl on 6/14/23, 6:54 PM

    "In-editor chat" is mentioned as an example (the only example in the post, as far as I can tell) of a restricted API feature. Since the post insinuates that the restricted APIs are done out of malice/with anticompetitive intent, I think we'd need to see an example of the vscode devs being asked for access to this "in-editor chat" API and know how they reply. Is there an example of this?

    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.

  • by k0k0r0 on 6/14/23, 9:27 PM

    Related: Github published a vim plugin to use Copilot.