I run the thing on a dedicated hardware machine, but I don't configure the separation between the harness control plane and individual shaitans that run inside it, so all the ssh keys the harness can access they can as well and sometimes they just run commands over ssh in commandline instead of doing it through the harness. I do have an option to put each of the /things/ in it's own isolated docker separate from the harness, but then what would I gain really?

At the end of the day, harness itself is effectively a backdoor allowing inference provider to run arbitrary shit on my device, regardless of the convoluted ways I use to provision such context.

They are at least conditioned to not read credentials and report to me if they accidentally read one.

One thing I totally don't give them access to is my npm token and ssh key that is set up on on github. I would rather type npm pub manually every time than ... than what actually?

I agree with all of that. Could an agent go rogue by ssh session and do something like quickly write and execute a piece of obfuscated bash that retrieves a payload I was previously unaware of and executes it? Yeah. Have I seen one of my agents do that yet? No, but I remain skeptical and know that such a thing could happen, theoretically. The VSCode agent in question seems to be designed from the outset to do this as an intentional feature, the part I am highly skeptical about is that it may not be informing its users of the full possible ramifications of what it installs by default.

Shock and horror!

when slaves became workers and joined the union, the unions became "social partners". this is how one closes the laptop at 4 and doesn't have to suffer vibe-decrees mandating RTO

seize the control plane.

There's also the risk that VS Code is a "trusted" application in many enterprises because developers force it to be. VS Code's node runtime (and plugin system) executing somewhat arbitrary Javascript means that any dev servers become vulnerable to exploits you otherwise might not have prepared to defend against [1].

Otherwise, you could see Javascript running on a server and instantly know something was odd, depending on the server.

[1] - https://www.darktrace.com/blog/darktrace-identifies-campaign...

A surprise waiting to happen if you Remote SSH into an agent sandbox.

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.

  cat /etc/motd >&2

please

MOSH is not suitable for automated usage such as TRAMP, VSCode, sshfs, etc. It is only intended for interactive use.

This is nonsense.

But so is the question. MOSH interprets all the escape sequences and uses them to decide what to send to the client. That way if you tail a log file and then get disconnected, you don’t have to download every line of text that was output to your terminal while you were away; it can just send you what is currently visible.

MOSH is strictly for interactive use; never ever for automated uses like TRAMP or VSCode or sshfs.

They will never open source it. For the same reason Pylance etc. aren't open source and MS tries hard to prevent them to be used in VSCodium. Every one of their open sourced projects contains a closed source plug that MS can pull at any time that is one of the features that gives the project its unique selling points.

And it doesn't work on BSD, and fails in an opaque way when it tries.

Every process takes some memory and other resource, yes a stale process will pretty much all end up all paged out and not massively in the way of active processes, but they still aren't entirely free so it is more than a bean-counting number.

Yes, under Linux (and most unix-a-like systems) small processes are cheap to bring up and tear down which is why we create them so much, and it is not uncommon for complex interactive commands and bits of shell scripts to create several¹, but these are all likely to be short-lived so a limit of 256 certainly doesn't seem to be obscenely low to me.

What could it be doing that requires 256+ processes to be kept around for a prolonged time?

--------

[1] made up example: comparing filtered content of two gzipped files and sending the result through a script to send alerts by mail if certain things are found would be 7+ (2x gzip, 2x or more grep, diff, bash, mail or curl depending on what service you are sending alerts through)

The max limit on 64 bit systems is what, 4,194,303? So if you have over 16,000 users per VM this limit makes sense, otherwise it just seems user-hostile.

And yet we still regularly loads of >100 on our 64 core HPC login codes, and swap is regularly used even with 96G of system memory (we have per UID memory limits too).

What's hostile is the VSCode (and Codex and Claude) makers developing tools that basically DoS a system because they assume it will operate only on single-user machines.

(And WTF are you doing that you're forking 256 processes? We have quite a few expensive HPC nodes: use those to build, not the damn login nodes.)

What would truly be user hostile would be to allow so many processes per UID that a small handful (maybe using VSCode) make the system slow or unresponsive to everyone else.

I don't even hit 256 on my desktop with a shitton of things open and 75 firefox sandbox processes, much less on a remote server. What in heaven's name are you doing to cross 256?

(Also this isn't a default limit.)

  > they are too low for modern development...

Do the math, 256 processes 50 MB each. How much RAM is that?

Too low? 256 reads as *pretty* generous to me.

Back in the day, because the architecture was shared memory and cooperative multitasking, this is how MacOS applications declared their memory constraints.

Apps had a (recommended and then user-configurable) "Minimum memory" and "Preferred memory." The app would not launch if the OS couldn't give it the minimum. It would then give the app up to the preferred amount, if available, exclusively... This was in the era before virtual memory and paging, so there was no easy way to share memory across an application boundary.

This mean that savvy users with high-resource tasks knew you had to launch your apps in a certain order to get the architecture into the configuration to do their work.

Quotas mean "more than this is clearly too much" not "please use this space".

Probably why both soft and hard limits were developed.

This is a fascinatingly "pets" approach to admin; it's been ages since I've been somewhere that used this approach. I've been in the "cattle fields" for decades now.

In my ecosystem, developers don't have time to glad-hand like this; if there are issues with DEV_NODE_CFG_1_29875, we might talk about it over Slack (because I'm the first one to know there's a problem as the end-user), and if we can't sort it out they'll give me some time to backup, blank the whole machine, and I get a brand-new image of DEV_NODE_CFG_1_29875.

I can't even tell you off the top of my head what territory the physical machine is running in or whether it's the only dev-node on that hardware.

(Broadly speaking, I think Microsoft is assuming cattle ecosystems; they're not openly-hostile to pets per se, but they have a strict ranking of the priorities because the "cattle ranches," as it were, bring in more money).

I had it seen on servers that were typically reserved for the team but there was no official booking system for those machines. When you start using the machine you would typically put some note to make sure somebody else does not overrun your long-running tests or performance measurements.

  > but that's probably not a universal stance.

Sometimes you aren't really "the owner". For one example I was admining my group's server in grad school. I wanted to add quotas (we already had zfs) because people were abusing home directories but my advisor and a few members were very against it because I was "over complicating things". Their worry about me wasting time (20 minutes for all machines...) resulted in hours of yelling at people over the years. All because, surprise, a small number of people can't follow instructions and abuse systems, ruining it for everyone.

Another frequent problem we had was people using the systems while others were. They wouldn't check the machine's status. And of course you can guess that I wasn't allowed to add a scheduler.

A lot of groups do things in janky ways. Often not because they don't know any better but because leadership doesn't and is assertive

We have the servers role, you can derive that from the name obviously, but we do have hosts which as the same naming scheme, but slightly different roles. There's when the last Puppet run happened and what it applied (and who authored it). Depending on the host type there's also active/standby, warnings for production hosts or information about increased log level on things like sudo.

It sounds like a lot, but it's fairly compact and really helps when you need to absolutely sure where you are and you have eight terminal windows open.

"The announcement was visible in a MOTD on every server in the fra3 location for the last two days."

"I have not touched any machines in fra3 for a week, how the hell would I know of it? Why do we even have #fra3-maintenance and #maintenance channels then, if that's your stance?"

Right?

Like, I used to, but it was in the early 1990s.. People look at them now?

Next I'll be asking people to finger me to get my availability ..

And then, of course, you copy that email to a Slack because nobody reads their email.

I'll find that there's just dozens of open sessions over months from users

We've had the same issue with our local HPC; a few login nodes serving hundreds of users at a time, and each login node used to get swamped by these dangling SSH sessions/servers. They also wrote a script that shuts down all sessions once a day to save the login nodes.

Use a local vim, and use its ssh support. It will download the file to the local buffer then upload it when you save. This way your vim config remains on your local machine, too.

Well, it's better than JetBrains Remote Development which opens a new SSH connection every second.

This is the first time I've seen anyone assume that anyone ever reads the MotD anymore since approximately 2002.

No snark: does your org also regularly check the mail spool and expect individual users to do so as well?

For all practical purposes VSCode is a vessel to sell AI, im using vscodium for now but expect a cycle reset for it this decade (someone makes a new lightweight IDE etc)

Yes, fair point. I also meant FOSS languages and how they didn’t require high end IDEs. So I definitely phrased my comment very poorly.

Sorry for the misunderstanding that caused. Though the upside was it did lead to your excellent comment adding the detail it did.

To me it was about sublime getting a little too popular for web development. MSoft needed an answer and so vscode was born.

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.

Also using it, and by now at least I see the reason why they did it. VSCode has a large plugin ecosystem, many which are essential for development. The problem is that those plugins don't know anything about remote development and expect to use the standard file system and OS APIs to interact with the workspace.

So how to make the plugins remote-capable? You could write a massive virtualization layer that captures all system calls and forwards them to the remote - or, you could run the plugin on the remote and just pass the user commands and UI updates over the connection.

VSCode does the latter, so the nodejs runtime is where all the plugins are running on the remote.

(I understood the reason, I didn't say it was a good reason...)

It also fills up the hard drives on shared server, where each user up to 5 GB of vscode nonsense.

Also, I realized that students are likely to use vscode to connect to embedded Linux machines and fill up their emmcs (and RAM), so I came up with a partial solution for our experiment's yocto image (https://github.com/RNO-G/meta-rno-g/blob/main/recipes-suppor...) , but a more general solution would be nice. Probably better to just not allow any node process to run via LSM.

It also has some unfortunate OS / glibc minimums which means that it's growing less useful as time goes on. I work on a lot of machines that are from centos 7 era (including amazon linux 2, which doesn't have an upgrade path: you just have to build a whole new instance and migrate). I have had to pin my vscode + extensions to old versions because it works on older machines. They just stopped supporting platforms (with lots of notice; to be fair). I would love if they had a binary tool that could be built which was much more agnostic to the vscode / extension version so that I could just keep using it everywhere I've been using it, while allowing me to keep current with the latest and greatest.

At least when Python minimum version changed there was a separate extension forked from the original that I can use when I need to work on old code alongside the new extension for more modern code bases. Sadly, no such thing exists for remote editing that I know of.

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49824802

Yeah, but to be honest on my current project the only extension that I needed, but wasn't available was the Typescript 8 support (the typescript with golang-based language-server) which should land eventually in the built-in typescript support.

What's the difference? As far as I can tell, Helium is just rebranded Ungoogled Chromium with pre-installed extensions or something.

You can restrict SSH access arbitrarily to ensure whatever security or access guardrails you need.

How, specifically for VSCode?

This is the key insight.

It turns out ssh is, well, a little awful. I use emacs as my primary dev tool, and I hardly ever tramp to a remote machine, preferring instead to ssh via terminal to the machine and run a local emacs instance on the target machine. Reason being that the ssh connection underlying Tramp can get downright creative in the ways it crashes or hangs emacs.

SSH, as a protocol, dates back to a time where you even though the network was built to be (ostensibly) robust against attack, there's a deeply-ingrained assumption that it's mostly up and persistent. That assumption doesn't work well in the era of laptops and wifi, as anyone who uses emacs regularly may be able to tell you. The defaults for SSH are wrong for the modern world, and once you tweak those the protocol reliability (against dropped or rerouted connection, not data corruption) is still rough.

Using SSH as a springboard to inject a better-designed protocol server is the right solution.

I've been using VSCode Remote since it came out and it is indeed a godsend. I use it to develop from one trusted machine on my own LAN to another trusted machine on my own LAN and I want the experience to be as similar as possible to developing locally, which it is, and which is why I appreciate it.

I'm not surprised people trying to provide remote code editing to non-trusted clients are freaked out by it, but it is a great tool when operating in a trusted circle.

basically the same things that Tramp could do as well?

Yes, just much faster. At the cost of a proprietary binary blob on the remote end, whereas tramp works with bare sh/bash.

However there's now tramp-rpc, which is tramp but talks to a Rust client on the remote side, and that makes Emacs even faster than vscode-over-ssh.

Don't know why you are being downvoted, this is how a lot of clients do it - Jetbrains does the same thing as well.

The difference is that there is an SSH agent at all, whereas Emacs just uses the built-in Bourne shell.

Some people get an icky feeling where remote editing tools change the remote filesystem in any way that is not explicitly done by the user. A binary installation of Node is extra extra icky. (I don’t have Node installed anywhere on my computers; I avoid JS if possible and if not I prefer Deno.)

Wait, you mean that with the VS Code protocol, the remote side can send the commands to my local VS Code, making it do all kinds of funny stuff? Seriously? That's not really obvious from TFA at all and mostly reads as their unease with running somewhat opaque piece of software at the remote written for Node instead of presumably well-maintained bunch of sh scripts (a very interesting supposition IMHO).

it does the reverse direction also. there's a security note indicating such on the remote ssh vscode extension page https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod...

Security Note Using Remote-SSH opens a connection between your local machine and the remote. Only use Remote-SSH to connect to secure remote machines that you trust and that are owned by a party whom you trust. A compromised remote could use the VS Code Remote connection to execute code on your local machine.

Is it? I've read the article twice (yesterday when you posted it and last year when it was first published), and that was not my interpretation.

This extension and devcontainers is basically the way to go for large dev teams inmho

why would anyone connect with this to an unknown/untrusted machine? it's more like giving away a gun that will shoot you if you point it at your own head and pull the trigger

I think it is so that the server extensions can do stuff on the client, imo the weirder part is that it installs a bunch of stuff on the remote

You say that like it's a bad thing; I narrowly escaped serious use of VSCode thanks to this fact.

Take zed for a spin

In practice, if I don't use the terminal from inside the editor, what are the advantages of this extension compared to the other one?

See https://open-vsx.org/extension/aergic/zygos-vscodium

It doesn’t use an AI agent.

It turns out we don’t have to care about any of this [...], so none of this matters in any kind of deep way, but: we’ve decided to just be a blog again, so: we had to learn this, and now you do too.

I found this closing sentence utterly delightful, particularly in an age of endlessly filtering every piece of text I read on the internet through a mental "was this written by Claude, Codex, or (just possibly) a human?" filter.

off topic, but I feel this observation was quite early in feb' 2025: "LLM-generated code is useful in the general case if you know what you’re doing. But it’s ultra-useful if you can close the loop between the LLM and the execution environment (with an “Agent” setup)."

kudos

Expecting vscode to police every single dev using it instead of a company is bananas.

Aha, thanks for explaining it in terms I can understand !

Every dev with ssh keys into prod should know it.

The assumption being made is VSCode is not running on the prod machine.

It didn't occur to me when I first read the article, but I do see now the author called it "remote editing" as you did too.

It may be worth more attention though. VSCode is not really remote editing (thick client, thin server binary), it's setting up a development environment (compilers, LSPs, editor extensions, etc.) on a remote thing (VM, container) that you access with a thin VSCode shell.

If you want to quickly edit a config file on a remote machine, TRAMP seems great. VSCode Remote SSH is not meant for that.

This should be covered by not giving developers SSH shell or equivalent access to production machines in the first place, or at the very least to have measures in place (ACLs, quotas, etc.) to strictly limit what they are able to do from the shell.

Pre-Download a known good VSCode server binary. VSCode will detect and use it.

What more could you ask for?

Oh wow I just checked my servers and on one the folder is 3.2GB and another has 1.7GB. It kind of looks like it just keeps copies of every version its ever installed? Theres several copies of node and `node_modules` folders.

I'm not super low on space but it also pretty clearly doesn't need to be that large, it looks like most of it is copies of itself.

Yeah, I learned how it worked when I made the mistake of trying to use it to develop on a Raspberry Pi, where it filled the disk and crashed/hung the Pi by using all the RAM until it started using swap. Fell back to local with an sshfs mount instead.

This really seems bananas. Why? What is the legitimate use case of the remote agent being able to run code on the local client's machine!?

Am I that much of? My reading of the following was that the remotely executed agent pushes commands back to your local vscode.

[...] VSCode mounts a full-scale invasion: it runs a Bash snippet stager that downloads an agent, including a binary installation of Node. [...]

It establishes a WebSockets connection back to your running VSCode front-end. The underlying protocol on that connection can:

Latency can be managed by having shared connections (for example: https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article42/ssh-connection-shari... ), so handshakes don't make everything super slow

The idea that it needs to run an agent on the remote machine to edit files over SSH is itself bananas.

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.

Haven't tried, but you could try building from source: https://codeberg.org/GramEditor/gram

I used gram predominately on the macbook neo and it worked well as a low-spec devbox

I’m currently experimenting with running:

- neovim

- in VS Code [1]

- in the browser

Cloud VM runs the built-in `code serve-web` command, over Tailscale using `tailscale serve`. No SSH. Extensions work. No extensions run locally (with SSH some extensions have to run locally on your machine).

I’m trying to see how little I can run on my local machine. VS Code over SSH is a good step in that direction, but there’s more attack surface if SSH is misconfigured, plus risk of an extension getting compromised.

I expected the added layers (neovim, through an extension, inside VS Code, over the web) to be slow, but so far it works surprisingly well.

[1] https://github.com/vscode-neovim/vscode-neovim

I should call my dev machine the Fly Machine too

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.

And the fact that it can go both ways is why the author would be "apoplectic if that happened during an incident on something in production" (emphasis mine). Because if you're doing this during an incident, you're connecting to a server that you have reason to think might be running malware right now. Which means that if the malware is programmed to look for incoming VS Code remote connections (not that hard to do, anyone competent enough to write the malware causing your production incident is probably capable of programming it), the malware could then infiltrate your dev machine via the VS Code remote tunnel. Your dev machine where you might well have credentials lying around in plaintext .env files.

Yeah, I'd be apopleptic too. Because the clueless dev who did that just escalated the production incident into "track down every credential that was present on that particular dev machine, and assume those credentials are now compromised and have to be rotated".

Before reading I thought of the classic meaning of an SSH Agent, which saves your private keys

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.

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).

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.

Honestly now that I'm basically dictating ai on what to do I've really stopped using all guis. Terminal is all I need.

Microsoft has still refused to setup any kind of extension sandboxing, so it seems clear they consider a warning notice sufficient security.

Misguided post, as you can see when you consider what VSCode and SSH are for.

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.

Because vscode needs to run language servers on the target machine as well.

440hz

I wonder if the same reverse code execution risk applies to the VSCodium extensions

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”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.)

I like VSCode server in general, but it's too memory hungry. It would crash Raspberry Pi (1GB) by eating up all the RAM.

Yeah it's super fast for search, which is the other big reason I'm still on it. The pain in the ass part is when you want to integrate some package that doesn't play nice right off the bat.

Look, I have no idea what the tool I’m using does, how it works, or what problems it solves. All I know is it doesn’t work as I want it to.

Back in 2008 I was working in a team that was trying to reduce build breaks in a company. It was rudimentary implementation of current CI systems meant to avoid breaking the nightly builds. It just ran a `make build` on a clean machine and let you see the output when it was done. One guy opened a “sever security vulnerability” because in his patch he replaced build target with the equivalent of a `curl | bash` and proclaimed that he hacked the build system. “You should verify what the patch is doing before running it” he said.

I am honestly surprised there wasn't a big VS Code Extension targeted npm attack.

The author didn't go into much explanation behind "I would be a little nervous about letting people VSCode-remote-edit stuff on dev servers".

If you are worried about having VSCode server-side binaries running directly on the bare metal OS you can isolate the workspace using containers or VMs.

I'm also on the verge to decide if to ban those vscode reverse shells in my servers. devs will cry for sure. Local claude cli instances are OK, I think, but remote is a huge risk.

I don't know what Microsoft is thinking if they allow this.

First time?

Try installing the azure cli into a docker image. Hope you enjoy having 2 GB of python interpreters around

I did build "RAT"-like (Remote Administration Tool) infra with automated http api generation for various tasks, my coworkers and I enjoyed using it.

But even when starting that, I was aware such patterns and remote access, yeah, this just has C&C botnet capabilities too.

It's not that deep, but there certainly is overlap with malware-esque patterns.

I always assumed VSCode Remote SSH was basically just SSH with some extra tooling. Turns out it’s a whole different beast.

feel the same as since I am doing more reading code and reviewing md files more than real modify code with agents now. VS Code, even with the remote mode is a big waste of my dev box (the resouce used by VS Code cli is no small). And after seeing herdr and omarchy, I realized what I really need is not a better remote code editor now (even Zed is too heavy), but an enhanced multi term through web page, so I developed my own tool called suwu, https://suwu.liyu1981.xyz, it is a tiling term session manager can drive herdr perfectly, but also (along with my own need), add many small tools like git graph, file browser, file reader, and even a X display in web.

Discussed at the time:

VSCode’s SSH agent is bananas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42979467 - Feb 2025 (511 comments)

(Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)