Rob Meyer
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robmeyer.net
Rob Meyer
@robmeyer.net
software engineer, father, project starter, less frequently project finisher, brewer, maker, mediocre cyclist.
Finally, I absolutely loved the DevEx of Codespaces. My dream code review exp would be a preconfigured Codespace for every PR I’m an assigned reviewer of, that I can jump into without having to a stash current changes, change branches, update node_modules.
December 28, 2025 at 11:40 PM
(And no, I hadn’t heard of that review extension so I’ll check it out! The important workflow detail would be seamlessly switching between my work in progress edits and code review mode without having to push stashes and switch branches manually.)
December 28, 2025 at 11:40 PM
Of course, containers have benefits beyond AI too. It also helps mitigate a npm supply chain attack and dovetails nicely with my imaginary code review in VS Code scenario.
December 28, 2025 at 11:40 PM
I’m not an AI doomsayer, but it would be easy for a malicious LLM to trick me into approving an obfuscated malicious command, I bet. I’ve reluctantly gone ahead and configured a few of the safer-seeming commands as auto-approved but probably sacrificed some safety in the process.
December 28, 2025 at 11:40 PM
In particular, the approval model adds protections but is a poor UX. Often one prompt in agent mode requires a dozen approvals. Human nature: with so many approval requests, I start to mentally “auto approve” and click approve before fully reading the entire terminal command as carefully as I should
December 28, 2025 at 11:40 PM
Thanks for the responses @hawkticehurst.com . I’m familiar with and appreciate all those protections. This is a “yes, and” situation, where I think also adding containers is a good measure, in addition to what is already there.
December 28, 2025 at 11:40 PM
Sorry, character limits forced brevity. By transparent I meant indicate whether a given file/project is type checked, linted, and indexed and how far along that process is. Sometimes it takes several minutes for squiggles to appear and I never know if it’s checked with zero errors in-progress
December 28, 2025 at 10:54 PM
E2) Also e.g., JS browser APIs like the newest File System Access API. (This probably is bundled with typescript? Needs to be updated out of band and manually managing .d.ts is a pain, IMO)

Relatedly, show caniuse/baseline status in the intellisense for everything.
December 28, 2025 at 6:16 PM
E1) Faster adoption of latest standards and documentation. Honestly, I’m not sure where in the toolchain the list of supported css property names, for example, live and who maintains those, but my dream would be to read an article about a new experimental web api/prop/attr and not get red squiggles
December 28, 2025 at 6:16 PM
D4) Ultimately, I think most authors of these free extensions just want to contribute to a better VS Code experience and would be beyond excited to hear you wanted to build their functionality in. Reminds me of JQuery who famously wanted it to become obsolete via their features becoming js standards
December 28, 2025 at 6:16 PM
D3) Also there are security and performance benefits to having it in the box.

Second, it feels like ripping off the works of these great extension authors. For this, I’d recommend reaching out to them before copying and consider a small donation of support.
December 28, 2025 at 6:16 PM
D2) I’m torn writing this one in two ways. First, not everyone has the same needs/wants and I don’t want VS Code to bloat. Ultimately, I decided to include this request because, like bracket color pairs, I can still be a configurable setting even if in to box.
December 28, 2025 at 6:16 PM
D1) Build the best simple extensions into the product. es6-string-html, vs-code-ext-color-highlight, wix.vscode-import-cost, better-ts-errors, etc. (looks like brackets colorizer is native now — yay!)
December 28, 2025 at 6:16 PM
C1) on the AI front, help make containerized dev environments the default and low effort to setup and maintain. It’s just a matter of time before an agent decides to “rm -rf ~” or similar (plenty of examples online).
December 28, 2025 at 6:16 PM
B2) In fact, I bet flipping the interface would make reviewing more collaborative to the extent “reviewers”would perform a symbol rename, move code around, refactor and push the commit as a proposed change that the author could merge or decline
December 28, 2025 at 6:16 PM
B1) Relatedly, I’d love to code review GitHub PRs directly in VS Code, where I get all the rich intellisense, go to source, search file/project, or even CoPilot functionality. I want to explore, exercise and debug the code while I review it.
December 28, 2025 at 6:16 PM
A2) I’m hopeful that tsgo and oxlint finally help here and they’re just around the corner, but this has been a painful status quo for the last 8+ years.
December 28, 2025 at 6:16 PM
A1) The biggest quality of life improvement would be faster (and more transparent) typescript and lint processing. I often see build/lint errors in my local dev server tool before they appear in the editor. Relatedly, “Find all references”, “Go to def”, “go to type definition” often slow or fail.
December 28, 2025 at 6:16 PM
It gets even better: the unused export was Knip’s “IssueFixer”

So… Knip fixed the issue of unused export, IssueFixer, by knipping knips “export”
December 27, 2025 at 6:02 PM
I love your overflowing joy.
December 24, 2025 at 5:07 PM
I’m not sure that those self-interest features justify the massive cost of maintaining a parallel implementation (not to mention the much larger cost on the ecosystem) but we can see leadership believes so, otherwise they’d just do a fork with slight differences, like Microsoft does with Edge.
December 20, 2025 at 5:23 AM
Sounds good at first glance (and maybe it would work out, who knows until we try) but popular opinion is competition would diminish and Google+Apple would lose control or encounter more pushback implementing self-interest features like ‘-apple-visual-effect: -apple-system-glass-material’
December 20, 2025 at 5:23 AM
… then I think about writing an app, then I realize I do this once every year or two and just walk to USPS/FedEx.
December 12, 2025 at 7:55 PM
Every time I have to do this I spend 30 minutes googling for a free way to digitally send a fax using my phone number (iOS app? Manually dial and hold my phone up to my computer speaker while it spits out AOL-startup-like sounds? Google voice feature? Zoom/Teams/G feature?)…
December 12, 2025 at 7:55 PM
Surprised Oracle didn’t announce they were paying Disney $1B to license the 3D models and shaders to render those characters at the same time that OpenAI announced a $1B investment into Oracle too. ♻️
December 12, 2025 at 2:37 AM