[jimbob45]

What's the harm here if the APIs are temporary and they don't have a history of elongating the lives of temporary APIs like this? They've stated the purpose of these "proposed APIs" and we have no evidence from the last decade to believe they'd renege on their stated goals.

[dartos]

> What's the harm here if the APIs are temporary

The “if” is carrying a lot of weight.

It gives Microsoft a solid competitive edge and a form of vendor lock-in in their otherwise mostly open product.

We don’t know that they’ll be temporary forever.

> They've stated the purpose of these "proposed APIs"

Just like how they said recall would not be a required feature, but is a dependency of the file explorer in the next version of windows?

Microsoft will say whatever looks good for them, obviously.

> last decade

But we do from the last 11+ years ;)

I’d always err on the side of not trusting giant monopolistic corporations with a history of garnering good will to cash in on it later.

Especially when that company has been very aggressively inserting itself in nearly every JS projects dependency/software delivery pipelines.

I gain nothing by trusting them, but I stand to lose my project’s independence from them.

[ndiddy]

The harm is that third-party developers aren't allowed to publish extensions that use "proposed APIs", but Copilot doesn't have to follow these rules because Microsoft both develops the extension and runs the Extension Marketplace website. Microsoft is therefore able to add functionality to their extension that third-party developers can only add by forking VS Code. VS Code forks lose access to the Extension Marketplace, and many Microsoft-published extensions (such as Pylance and LiveShare) will only run on official Microsoft builds of VS Code, not forks.