Comment by sh34r

If you know your way around the Docker CLI, you can mount your workspace in a new container environment and run it however which way you want. You can attach VSCode to arbitrary containers. You can find the commands used to build the dev container image and run it, either in the logs or with docker inspect.

There’s no coupling being forced by devcontainers. It’s just a useful abstraction layer, versus doing it all manually. There is some magic happening under the hood where it takes your specified image or dockerfile and adds a few extra layers in there, but you can do that all yourself if you wanted to.

I will say, if you stray too far off the happy path with devcontainers, it will drive you insane, and you’ll be better off just doing it yourself, like most things that originated from MSFT. But those edge cases are pretty rare. 99% of workflows will be very happily supported with relatively minimal declarative json configuration.