Today I‘m trying to get Dev Containers run in VSCode. Putting aside all the vibe coding / Cursor craziness for a second, it seems that Dev Containers is actually quite a mature feature in VSCode, and it looks pretty cool. Last time I tried doing development with containers a few years ago, it was all a bit of a mess, especially on MacOS where Docker wasn’t even running properly. Anyhow, it seems that things have moved on considerably, and things are quite streamlined. I've managed to clone a public repo from Github, install all of the project dependencies, compile the code, and access the created website over HTTP. Crucially, everything is running inside a VSCode devcontainer, and that devcontainer is running in a container management tool that does not require root priveledges to run. At least that’s the idea. There were a few issues along the way, so blog post to follow. Once I have it all working in VSCode, I think it should be quite straight forward getting it to work in Cursor since as far as I understand, Cursor is based on VScode.
As I’m writing this I’m discovering that Cursor is proprietary software, which imo isn’t great because it’s running all sorts of things on your behalf, which requires a lot of trust. And of course it’s an AI that’s controlling Cursor, and who the heck knows what that means. And why the fuck have they taken VSCode which is open source and made it proprietary? That’s weird. Anyway, these are just the toughts going through my head as I tentatively walk down this new "shiny" road. #