As a Linux user I've hated VSCode's ssh. There's lot of annoying things that make it harder to admin for. Like it doesn't pick up the MotD, preventing me from showing users important messages. I've found that it also doesn't reuse sessions (at least by default. TBF, neither does ssh) and I'll find that there's just dozens of open sessions over months from users. I literally had to write a script to boot people...

It would be one thing if the plugin was just a wrapper and people were still expected to know ssh but the plugin abstracts away all that and is intended to make it a "use VSCode on remote machine" tool. So it needs to do more than just handle creds, otherwise it creates a divergent experience while making people think it's just ssh

Yeah this is the right architecture for remote editing with remote tools. It works really well. (There are longstanding bugs around reconnection when the SSH connection is broken but that's not the fault of the architecture.)

Nothing has changed as far as the insecurity the article has outlined.

The problem is the remote host has control over local host through the protocol.

I’ve been using it daily since it came out. At first it was because I was tired of docker slowing my Mac down with some really heavy client projects. But now I use it as an easier ssh client w/ file editing. I really don’t like using vim/nano. Keeping everything in the same ide, huge for me.

“A tool with a purpose of editing files on a remote system can edit files on a remote system.”

The ethos of VSCode was supposed to be lightweight, something like Notepad++ with a terminal. Developers have lost the plot. Please recommend Visual Studio if you would like a feature-rich SSH agent. I think developer trends have supercharged VSCode and it feels shinier and new with all the extensions but this is an anti-pattern; it defeats the whole purpose.