The art of simplicity

Agents write most of my code these days. That leaves me with this question: what do I do with all this free time? I considered learning a new framework, but that sounds suspiciously like work. Luckily, the VS Code team has a better idea. They gave me something to take care of. What is the VS Code pet? The pet is an interactive character that sits above the chat input box. It reacts to chat activity and to whatever you do to it. So while the agent works, the pet watches. Before, I was the only one staring at the progress indicator while pretending to supervise. Now I have company. Remark: The pet is marked as experimental, so it might change or be removed. Don't get too attached. (I got attached within five minutes.) Adopting your pet Type /vscode-pet in the chat input to show or hide it. In the new-session view of the Agents window, you can also right-click outside the input box and select Pet (/vscode-pet) . Show or hide. That's the entire commitment. As fa...

Dependency Track is an open source component analysis platform from OWASP. You upload the SBOM of your application, and Dependency Track keeps track of the components inside it. It checks those components against vulnerability sources like the National Vulnerability Database, GitHub Advisories and OSV. It also lets you define policies and send notifications when something new shows up. In short: it tells you which of your applications are affected when the next vulnerable library hits the news. Recently Dependency Track got an upgrade and version 5 was released. So, time to upgrade! However, that turned out not to be as easy as expected. It took us 2 attempts. Our first attempt failed completely, so we took a different route. Here is what we tried and the two things that cost us the most time. Big shout out to Jef, who looked over my shoulder during the upgrade and helped tackling the issues when we got stuck. Two approaches in the documentation The Dependency Track documenta...

Recently I tried to spin up a new container and Docker refused with this error: OSError: [Errno 28] No space left on device: Not the most helpful message, but the root cause was simple: the disk used by the Docker engine was full. As you can see in the screenshot below, I was eating up almost the full 250GB available for Docker: Where did my disk space go? Before deleting anything, let's find out what is actually using the space. Docker has a built-in command for this: docker system df This gives you a summary of the space used by images, containers, local volumes and build cache. Want more detail per item? Add the verbose flag: docker system df -v In my case, the usual suspects were to blame: old images, stopped containers and build cache that had been piling up for months. Cleaning up Start with the safest options and work your way up. Remove all stopped containers: docker container prune Remove dangling images (untagged layers that are no longer refer...

When you let Copilot edit your code in agent mode, every change waits for a decision: Keep or Undo. For a small change that's fine. After ten prompts in a row, you're clicking Keep more than you're reading code. VS Code has a setting to take that click away. Why do we need this? By default, edits from chat are pending until you accept or discard them. The pending state survives closing VS Code, so you can come back later and still decide. That's a good default. But if you already review everything in a diff before you commit, the extra step per edit adds little. Accept edits after a delay Add this to your settings.json : "chat.editing.autoAcceptDelay": 5 Edits are now accepted automatically after the delay. The default is 0 , which means auto-accept is disabled. You are not locked out. While the countdown runs, hover over the editor overlay controls to cancel it, and you can still Undo afterwards. Keep approval for sensitive files Auto-...

I think that is the clearest blog title I used in years. Why do I mention this? Let me explain... Some time ago we stumbled over a performance issue in our applications. The root cause was a fragmented index, caused by the usage of a standard guid instead of a sequential guid. While looking for the right fix, I had to revisit one of my own posts: Sequential GUIDs with .NET 9 . In that post I mentioned that you can use Guid.CreateVersion7() to create a sequential guid. That is technically correct, but it is NOTa solution for SQL Server. Why does a random guid hurt? A clustered index in SQL Server is a sorted B-tree. When the key is random, every insert lands on a random page. If that page is full, SQL Server has to split it, which leaves you with half-empty pages, a fragmented index and more I/O. A sequential key always appends at the end, so pages fill up and stay put. Why is a version 7 guid not sequential for SQL Server? A UUID version 7 (RFC 9562) starts with a 48-bit U...

An architect in one of our teams selected auto mode in GitHub Copilot and ended up on a high-cost model. Nothing was broken, auto did what it is designed to do. But it was the trigger for a broader discussion: Should we disable some (of the more expensive) models? What does auto actually do? Auto looks at every prompt and selects the model that is best suited for it. The choice is based on task complexity and model availability. Usage is charged based on the model auto selects, so a heavy reasoning model means a heavy bill. The models auto can choose from are limited by your plan and by policy. Organization owners can enable or disable a model under Settings > Copilot > Models . However, be aware that by default every model that becomes generally available is on by default for GitHub Copilot Business and Enterprise. If you want to approve every model yourself, disable the "Default availability for released models" policy. Disable a model here and auto will...