Top
Best
New

Posted by Rapzid 16 hours ago

VSCode's SSH Agent Is Bananas (2025)(fly.io)
256 points | 161 commentspage 2
edoceo 13 hours ago|
Why not sshfs? Been using that for ages, since before VSCode existed. Is it suddenly broken?
narmiouh 13 hours ago||
There is a huge difference between running sshfs and vscode remote. vscode remote tries to completely put the user on the remote machine, the terminal, the environment and anything else the remote box has access to the user can work with it. It allows me to connect to my dev environment (remote box) from any PC, or with the right setup even a browser.

In my team this allowed us to setup a consistent dev environment where everyone has access to the same specs, same environment, easy to manage access control sensitive systems from that remote machine on forward etc... sshfs or using sftp that many of the older IDEs did, don't come close to making it so seamless.

edoceo 11 hours ago||
I must have been doing something different then. Ages ago we had devs using remote vns, shell in and also remote mount and then run and debug, they could work from office or home or road; consistent devenv. Granted we had to have cfEngine (then Puppet IIRC) help us. In 2026 we've got containers for almost everything but, I still work with some legacy-ass systems doing things this way. We've added more ceremony and more code but, the workflow is not significantly improved, IMO. I don't get new features, just nee ways of doing the same old.
eddythompson80 8 hours ago||
Nothing is stopping you from doing that still. Personally, I hate the latency in VNC/RDP not to mention the laggy UX, reduced colors, and the overall degradation in the experience.

The nice thing about vscode remoting design is that it’s not that. Even on a high-ish latency ssh connection, the editor buffers are local and the editor UX as a whole is local on your machine so things are still relatively smooth despite high pings on remote connections. Even with vim running in an ssh session, you’ll have a bad time when your latency is high. I know MOSH supposedly helps with that, but I had annoying issues with that too.

sshfs solves the laggness problem, but you are just mounting a remote file system while using your local machine for the build. VNC/RDP/SSH lets you use the remote machine resources for build, but you have to deal with the lag. Vscode remoting lets you use the local machine for the editor UX, and the remote machine resources for LSPs, debuggers, build, etc. yes the protocol doesn’t give you isolation between the 2 machines, but not sure it ever claimed that. I use it from my very under-powered laptop to keep all the heavy builds on a beefy desktop machine with an abundance or resources.

self_awareness 8 hours ago||
Because vscode needs to run language servers on the target machine as well.
kayson 12 hours ago||
I wonder if the same reverse code execution risk applies to the VSCodium extensions
Shorel 15 hours ago||
For my own agent one of the design constraints is that it can't get out of the work directory, and it can't even try to guess the full path of that directory. Interesting that VSC has gone the other way entirely.
comandillos 15 hours ago||
This extension and devcontainers is basically the way to go for large dev teams inmho
low_tech_punk 11 hours ago||
I like VSCode server in general, but it's too memory hungry. It would crash Raspberry Pi (1GB) by eating up all the RAM.
mischanix 14 hours ago||
This 2025-era rant seems quaint in comparison to how 2026 has gone.
angry_octet 12 hours ago|
You would think, now that we're running demon-powered code on our sandboxed machine, that allowing that machine to have full control over the local client would be considered a bad idea.

But Microsoft won't fix VSCode because it would possibly impede usability by amateurs, and inject tedious security concepts like boundaries into the dev process.

HoldOnAMinute 14 hours ago||
Was author trying to avoid the word "rootkit"?
rmunn 14 hours ago||
That's the word I thought he was hinting at... but then I looked up the word "murid". It has two meanings, one from Sufism (a novice seeking spiritual enlightenment) and one from science (muridae is the family of rodents that includes rats and mice). Neither one of those seems to match "rootkit". I suspect he intended the mice-and-rats meaning, but I don't know what word related to rats or mice might have a similar meaning to "rootkit".

EDIT: Found it. He's referring to the acronym RAT meaning "Remote Access Trojan" (or, if actually intended, Remote Administration Tool).

grahamannett 14 hours ago||
probably trojan or malware?
rmunn 14 hours ago||
Since muridae is the family of rodents that includes rats and mice, I believe he's referring to a RAT, a Remote Access Trojan. Something that functions rather like https://hunt.io/malware-families/reversessh or other similar malware, in other words.
kittikitti 14 hours ago||
I think the last time I linked SSH to a few V'sM through VSCode it auto-installed node, npm, and hundreds of megabytes of npm packages, then it persisted a node service. It's bananas that it still does this. I have never used SSH through VSCode again.
LoganDark 12 hours ago||
> ”hallucination” is what we call it when LLMs get code wrong; “engineering” is what we call it when people do.

When people get it wrong, we call that a mistake. LLMs don't get the privilege of making mistakes, because there's no evidence of the idea required for something to even be a mistake. Can't call something unintended when there was no intention to begin with. (You absolutely can call it a mistake or unintended on the part of an operator -- I wouldn't say so of the LLM itself though.)

jan_m_savage 10 hours ago|
i got tired of vscode always complaining about sth. I am liking neovim and Jetbrains IDEs, these never gave me any headache.
suzzer99 10 hours ago|
I'm still on SublimeText, which is old, and a pain in the ass, but at least is not being actively enshittified.
Shorel 5 hours ago||
I'm still in SublimeText, which is fast, and does everything I need. Including not being a programming agent.
More comments...