Conceptually, this is correct, but you must account for the fact that some problems are so hard to explain in English and have so many restrictions and strict rules that you end up writing a much longer and much more brittle program.
In the end, you need to explain the real world problem as without it, the AI does not know what to do, however smart it is.
This is a bad take. Large companies have often team collaborating across the globe so they're used to partial remote already. My company (Microsoft) turned mostly remote, teams that started through COVID have never seen office. Also the company doubled through COVID so a large portion of the company is remote first.
Also.. Offices cost a lot whether you're big co or a start-up.
It is amazing for typing out mock data. Say you're testing parsing of XML - it can easily suggest the the assertions over the data parsed from the XML.
Example test that was 95% coming out of Copilot:
https://github.com/dotnet/arcade-services/blob/61babf31dc63c...
It also predicts comments and logging messages amazingly well (you type "logger." add 7/10 times get what you want, sometimes even better), incorporating variables from the context around. This speeds up the tedious parts of programming when you are finalizing the code (adding docs + tracing).
Honestly, Copilot saves me so much time every week while turning chores into a really fun time.
I didn't appreciate developing Azure Pipelines in YAML so I've created a library that lets you use C# instead.
Aside the apparent advantages of the strong typed environment, I was able to bake in many more features that make your life easier. Code reuse is also super easy.
How is Microsoft reducing your ability? No functionality got behind a paywall. On contrary, the VS Code plugin will actually get much better because of this effort - you can read the authors of OmniSharp clearly stating this[0], links are in the comments above. Microsoft spends a lot of money to bring you free experiences. Then it has the business on top of that where it offers better experience. Nothing different to what JetBrains does in this regard. Except that this fuels how you are able to fund the free experience in the first place.
I agree but also - a controversial opinion - I am pretty sure Microsoft collects the kind of telemetry to learn about user behavior and improve the IDE, and not to collect private information for some kind of other gain. I am sure that whoever develops Codium will eventually get into a dead-end at some point because they won't have any telemetry connected to the product usage. Other piece is that Codium might inherently actually thrive because of some product decisions based on the telemetry Microsoft has so so it's not a fair fight.
Disclaimer: I am a Microsoft employee and this is my opinion only but I say this because I know what it's like to work on apps used by tens of millions of people and I can tell you that you're dead in the water when you have no idea how people use your product. And no, at this scale, controlled user testing is not sufficient. I've worked on countless Microsoft products over the years from Office through Skype to Teams. I've also been personally adding some telemetry into these but ALWAYS to be data driven when making product decisions such as "which button should we display here", "did we improve latency/stability/discoverability/.." and "which new feature will be actually useful".
Now.. I don't know VS Code 100% but I did see some internal talks, have access to some telemetry (didn't browse it much) and I can say that the team is full of good intentions. They just deal with difficult UX problems. I've also worked at Google and I think it's much different when your product/business is using/selling data about customers as compared to creating tools for developers. You are after a very different type of data in essence and I think the actual privacy is not contended here.
I am sure people will spin this the usual way "big company big bad" and "you never know what they will try to collect next" but in that case, I can only suggest you get a job in one of these companies and see how you will develop anything without real data to back your decisions and assumptions about the real world.