Comment by Tyriar
1 month ago
Some JIT notification to enable it and/or a status bar/banner was considered, but ultimately this was chosen to improve the user experience. Instead of opening a folder, having it restricted and editing code being broken until you click some item in the status bar, it's asked up front.
It was a long time ago this was added (maybe 5 years?), but I think the reasoning there was that since our code competency is editing code, opening it should make that work well. The expectation is that most users should trust almost all their windows, it's an edge case for most developers to open and browse unfamiliar codebases that could contain such attacks. It also affects not just code editing but things like workspace settings so the editor could work radically different when you trust it.
You make a good point about the cookie banner reflex, but you don't need to use accept all on those either.
IMO this is a mistake, for basically the same reason you justify it with. Since most people just want the code to work, and the chances of any specific repo being malicious is low, especially when a lot of the repos you work with are trusted or semi-trusted, it easily becomes a learned behavior to just auto accept this.
Trust in code operates on a spectrum, not a binary. Different code bases have vastly different threat profiles, and this approach does close to nothing to accomodate for that.
In addition, code bases change over time, and full auditing is near impossible. Even if you manually audit the code, most code is constantly changing. You can pull an update from git, and the audited repo you trusted can be no longer trustworthy.
An up front binary and persistent, trust or don't trust model isn't a particularly good match match for either user behavior or the potential threats most users will face.
So why not allow for enabling this behavior as a configuration option? A big fat banner for most users (i.e. by default) and the few edge cases get the status bar entry after they asked for it.