Glad to be using devcontainers
2025-07-06 11:11:40 +01:00 by Mark Smith
I had a bit of a strange incident with Gemini in VSCode yesterday that I think is worth mentioning. After getting quite a lot of stuff done, Gemini took a bit of an odd turn, and was suggesting changes that I didn‘t agree with. I decided not to accept the changes it was proposing, and gave it my reasoning. It eventually did agree with me that what it had suggested didn‘t align with my goals, but as we moved forward it started making more and more silly mistakes. It felt like it was slowly escalating.
I decided to close VSCode down, and I was going to restart a fresh chat session, and I mentioned this politely in the chat. When I opened VSCode back up, the chat session was blocked. It was the error where it says that your account is no longer allowed to use the product and asks you to switch account. I disconnected the devcontainer in VSCode and when I restarted it fresh, there were a ton of errors in the startup logs. The devcontainer wouldn‘t even boot. I troubleshooted it for a while but eventually decided to ditch the container and rebuild from scratch. Luckily I had been committing code regularly so I didn‘t lose anything. I jumped out to the container orchestrator software and deleted the container, then back into VSCode and rebuilt a new devcontainer.
After the rebuild everything started up clean, no error in the logs, I had to re-install all the VSCode plugins from scratch, after which I was able to login without issues into the Gemini Code Assistant. I find that strange. At the very least it‘s quite a terrible user experience. It‘s pretty rare that a container gets hosed. I actually can‘t even remember that ever happening to me. I certainly didn‘t change anything in either the container or in the OS that was running in it. The only other entity that had full access to the container OS was Gemini. Weird.
I sure am glad I‘m using devcontainers. #