Extension fails in monorepo scenarios

[johndunderhill]

This extensions breaks our environment handling in our monorepo, and is full of bugs.

I'm not the only one who thinks so: It has the lowest rating I've ever seen for a VS Code extension.

Please, please, please stop force-installing it. At least give us a choice. This is causing tons of support issues for our devops people every day. Please stop installing this extension automatically. Please stop 'rolling it out.' Please.

I don't understand how Microsoft could be so mean to its developers. It's more than just 'one point of view' or 'an issue that needs to be addressed.' It's downright cruel to do this to developers. I've never seen anything even remotely like this: I keep removing it, and it keeps coming back.

This is borderline malware. No, it is malware. You're making us want to look for alternatives to VS Code, just to get away from this cruel disregard for your users.

John Underhill

[karthiknadig]

Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback. I can see how frustrating this experience has been for you and your team, and I want to acknowledge that we take reports like this seriously.

This new extension was a significant rewrite aimed at making environment management more maintainable and extensible. The previous system had become very difficult to evolve, especially for supporting new environment managers. The new design introduces an API surface that allows external contributors to add support for tools like Pixi, uv, and others and we’re already seeing new ecosystem contributions built on top of it.

We tested the new extension extensively for nearly a year before rolling it out, and for the vast majority of users, it works silently and reliably, which means we don’t often hear from them. However, when it does fail, it can fail in ways that disrupt workflows like yours, and that’s absolutely something we want to fix.

The biggest challenge we face is that low ratings don’t tell us what is failing, whereas detailed bug reports help us pinpoint and resolve issues quickly. If you can share a repro case or details about how environment handling is breaking in your monorepo setup (even a minimal example), it would be extremely helpful for us to diagnose and address the issue.

We truly appreciate your patience and passion for improving the Python experience in VS Code. Please know that our goal isn’t to make things harder for developers, quite the opposite. and feedback like yours is essential to getting this right.

So please create a bug with details on what is breaking for you, so we can recreate it and see how we can address it.

[karthiknadig]

Just to add some additional context, one of the key reasons for this redesign was exactly to support complex monorepos where different folders or projects use different Python versions or environment types.

We built and tested the new environment management UI against large-scale repositories (including one with over 350 sub-projects and distinct environments) to ensure that scenarios like these could be handled smoothly. The new UI should make it easier to see and switch between environments per folder or workspace, or even per file (like PEP-723), instead of relying on implicit or global behavior.

If you’re seeing this fail in your monorepo, that’s definitely not the intended experience. It would help us a lot if you could share details about your repo’s layout or any specific workflows that are breaking, those are the cases we most want to understand and fix.

[github-actions]

Because we have not heard back with the information we requested, we are closing this issue for now. If you are able to provide the info later on, then we will be happy to re-open this issue to pick up where we left off.

Happy Coding!