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Microsoft is introducing hidden APIs to VS Code only enabled for Copilot?

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Re: Microsoft is introducing hidden APIs to VS Code only enabled for Copilot?

#131

Post by epolanski »

com2kid wrote: post #61
tristan957 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has Microsoft allowed Cursor to access the VSCode Marketplace? As far as I know, it is against the ToS for any editor other than VSCode to access it.

I think Cursor just mirrors the VSCode marketplace on their own servers. They used to have an ugly work around for installing extensions, but now it just works and I see links to https://marketplace.cursorapi.com/ inside of Cursor's extension browser.

I use both vsc and cursor, cursor imported automatically all my vsc extensions and settings and theme and everything.

Re: Microsoft is introducing hidden APIs to VS Code only enabled for Copilot?

#132

Post by sshine »

canes123456 wrote: post #96
peeters wrote: post #80

Earlier 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.

> Visual studio is open source

Sort of. The core is, and the installable binaries with telemetry and properietary extensions are not.

The open source, telemetry-free version of VSCode is called VSCodium: https://vscodium.com/

> Didn't cusor fork it and is building it features directly into the fork?

Yes, in their recent interview with Lex Fridman they argued that life as an extension is too limiting.

The main reason we criticise Microsoft for doing this and not them is just their size and market dominance.

Why jump through hoops to make competitors better able to hotwire their own AI into VSCode, or hotwire Copilot into their own IDE, when it's easier to iterate fast and remain unpredictable?

Re: Microsoft is introducing hidden APIs to VS Code only enabled for Copilot?

#133

Post by adolph »

SSLy wrote: post #122
Arainach wrote: post #86

Earlier 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 is developed by VPs borged from github

Other way around:

In 2011 [Erich Gamma] joined the Microsoft Visual Studio team and leads a development lab in Zürich, Switzerland that has developed the "Monaco" suite of components for browser-based development, found in products such as Azure DevOps Services [0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Gamma

1. https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/

Re: Microsoft is introducing hidden APIs to VS Code only enabled for Copilot?

#134

Post by [deleted] »

Arainach wrote: post #86
frenchie4111 wrote: post #13

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. 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…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is introducing hidden APIs to VS Code only enabled for Copilot?

#135

Post by epolanski »

I don't necessarily see anything particularly malicious to be honest.

Before you introduce public APIs you need a use case and someone to spearhead them and copilot is doing that.

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.

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.

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.

What other code editor has ever been so impactful and open in the last decades?

Re: Microsoft is introducing hidden APIs to VS Code only enabled for Copilot?

#136

Post by jdthedisciple »

Etheryte wrote: post #113
ghuntley wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I have discovered a truly marvelous reason for them being private, which this margin is too narrow to contain [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem#Fermat...

I see what you did there (Y)

Re: Microsoft is introducing hidden APIs to VS Code only enabled for Copilot?

#137

Post by epolanski »

wiz21c wrote: post #51

Microsoft gives a product for free. It is free to add whatever features it wants in it. No? (and that's why I use emacs...)

Plenty of companies thrive on the forks, stackblitz, cursor, gitpod and many others.

But you can't expect from Microsoft to also open and share every single tool for vsc itself, you're still free to implement it though.

Re: Microsoft is introducing hidden APIs to VS Code only enabled for Copilot?

#139

Post by torginus »

Eikon wrote: post #5

Seems 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, there are APIs in Windows today, that were added temporarily in one of the early betas of Windows 95 as a stopgap measure. By the time MS got around to replacing them with proper versions, they found that big applications were already using them.
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