Has VS Code dominated the code editor market? If not, is this a prerequisite for discussing anti-competitive issues?
Microsoft is introducing hidden APIs to VS Code only enabled for Copilot?
121–130 of 227 posts
Re: Microsoft is introducing hidden APIs to VS Code only enabled for Copilot?
#122Everyone 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. S…
Disclaimer: I used to work at Microsoft. These days I work at a competitor. All words my own and represent neither entity. Microsoft has the culture and the technology to tell private and public APIs apart and to check code across the company to ensure that only public APIs are called. This was required for decades as part of the Department of Justice consent decree and every single product in the company had scanner…
vscode is developed by VPs borged from github, no? those wouldn't know. not that I approve such things, certainly not.
Re: Microsoft is introducing hidden APIs to VS Code only enabled for Copilot?
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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? Wouldn't another way of saying that be "the Copilot development team is leveraging their Microsoft ownership to create products in a way no…
Is it even not available to competitors? Visual studio is open source. Didn't cusor fork it and is building it features directly into the fork? Not doing something like this would make Copilot at a disadvantage.
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Re: Microsoft is introducing hidden APIs to VS Code only enabled for Copilot?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disclaimer: I used to work at Microsoft. These days I work at a competitor. All words my own and represent neither entity. Microsoft has the culture and the technology to tell private and public APIs apart and to check code across the company to ensure that only public APIs are called. This was required for decades as part of the Department of Justice consent decree and every single product in the company had scanner…
vscode is developed by VPs borged from github, no? those wouldn't know. not that I approve such things, certainly not.
vscode predated github acquisition by several years
Re: Microsoft is introducing hidden APIs to VS Code only enabled for Copilot?
#125Seems pretty common that a platforms owner would actually try new apis with their own stuff. What better way to get primary real world usage before stabilizing?
This is the real answer to this. They know they can coordinate with the Copilot team to change or remove API usage much quicker than third party extensions.
I bet they'd love if there were a way to have trusted testers that they could _force_ to make timely updates like they likely can with Copilot.
Maybe they should look into Chrome's Origin Trial system and make time-limited API tokens so that extension developers know that features relying on experimental APIs will break, even if the API itself doesn't. That seems to keep causal usage at bay and make sure that trial developers stay on top of things.
Re: Microsoft is introducing hidden APIs to VS Code only enabled for Copilot?
#126After 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. What is Cursor doing that they couldn't do as an extension?
have you tried their cmd+k and Composer experiences? those are new ui paradigms not implementable in extension. native integration that "feels" third party is not going to stand out.
Re: Microsoft is introducing hidden APIs to VS Code only enabled for Copilot?
#127Everyone 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. S…
Disclaimer: I used to work at Microsoft. These days I work at a competitor. All words my own and represent neither entity. Microsoft has the culture and the technology to tell private and public APIs apart and to check code across the company to ensure that only public APIs are called. This was required for decades as part of the Department of Justice consent decree and every single product in the company had scanner…
> Microsoft has the culture and the technology to tell private and public APIs apart and to check code across the company to ensure that only public APIs are called. This was required for decades as part of the Department of Justice consent decree and every single product in the company had scanners to check that they weren't using any private APIs (or similar hacks to get access to them such as privately searching for symbols in Windows DLL files).
I thought that only applied to private Windows APIs?
The antitrust case was about the Windows monopoly specifically, so other MS products calling Windows private APIs was in its scope. But, this is more comparable to another MS product calling a private Visual Studio API – I don't believe that was in the scope of that antitrust case. Did Microsoft have policies and processes against that scenario too?
Re: Microsoft is introducing hidden APIs to VS Code only enabled for Copilot?
#128I 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 wit…
Because people are concerned that the embrace, extend, extinguish of Microsoft will rear its ugly head and we’ll all have been bamboozled again to use closed source software.
I've not been unable to understand why people trust a corporation with 20 years of demonstrable embrace, extend, extinguish and other tactics, and with not even a word of repentance or even contrition, to not do this again. I think we should be assuming it's in the corporate culture to do this again unless they at the very least publicly say they intend to do otherwise. (Of course, talk is cheap, but if you want to rebuild trust, it's the first step.)
Although I pretty much disagree with their entire design value system even on the technical and UI levels (especially the latter), and can't see why anyone puts up with Windows. But clearly many people do, so obviously I'm missing something.
Re: Microsoft is introducing hidden APIs to VS Code only enabled for Copilot?
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
You working hard doesn't change the facts. Velocity doesn't excuse anti-competitive behavior. I would've thought the DoJ case against Microsoft would've taught you that you can't just do whatever you want because it's convenient for you, especially when it has an effect on your competitors. This isn't about feelings. This is about a multi-billion dollar corporation doing whatever it wants, yet again, to the detriment…
Why are you making this personal? Do you know me? Do you know where I live, or how much I really earn? (Spoilers: One of the ass-ends of Europe, not that much - _certainly_ not anywhere near what my US counterparts earn, even "adjusted" to local terms) Or do you hate Microsoft so much that you think that frees you from, you know, having basic human decency? I suppose you've found this to be great excuse to go on a cr…
Your "HN folk's ability to empathize with people working hard" made it personal...
Re: Microsoft is introducing hidden APIs to VS Code only enabled for Copilot?
#130Everyone 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. S…
Disclaimer: I used to work at Microsoft. These days I work at a competitor. All words my own and represent neither entity. Microsoft has the culture and the technology to tell private and public APIs apart and to check code across the company to ensure that only public APIs are called. This was required for decades as part of the Department of Justice consent decree and every single product in the company had scanner…
What a coincidence, I was just browsing Microsoft's Go fork (for FIPS compatibility, basically replacing Go crypto with OpenSSL and whatever API Windows has, just like there's a Google's fork that uses BoringSSL), and found this patch:
https://github.com/microsoft/go/blob/microsoft/main/patches/...
Upstream Go tricks Windows into enabling long path support by setting an undocumented flag in the PEB. The Microsoft Go fork can't use undocumented APIs, so this commit removes the hack.
So, even if they fork something, they have to strictly follow this guideline and remove undocumented API usage. I wonder if this only applies to Windows APIs though.