Oh, I use coding assistants every day, just not the one that came with VSCode. Because I want to decide if/which coding assistant I want to use, not whatever VSCode forces upon me. In fact, at many companies, GitHub Copilot is explicitly forbidden.
Not the smartest argument to brand this as anti-AI.
I really like the Copilot autocomplete across multiple symbols in the file (e.g. predictive edits that you can tab through).
For most other stuff I prefer Cline/RooCode/KiloCode, but sadly it doesn’t seem like any of those offer similar autocomplete (Continue.dev did with even Ollama support for local models but the whole plugin was a buggy mess and it didn’t work well). Oh and sometimes Claude Code or Codex is nice in a terminal directly.
Personally, I don’t mind something being there by default (same as how JetBrains has their pre installed plugin and also something like Junie available), as long as it’s easy to turn off or uninstall.
Similar to how I wouldn’t scoff at a Git integration plugin even if I prefer to use Sourcetree or GitKraken.
Not the smartest argument to brand this as anti-AI.