Maybe I am biased as an app developer myself but I want VSCode engineers to have telemetry from me so they can see how I use the app and improve it. Same when Apple asks me for iOS, iPad, etc.

As a VSCode extension creator - thank you! People may not realize how hard it is to make a great app if you have no idea what your users are doing with it.

On web apps there is all kinds of tracking and it’s heavily used to make the apps better (not just for marketing or annoying you). In a code editor extension there is the same need for that type of information, and telemetry is the only way to get it.

How about actually talking with your users? Telemetry is a poor substitute for that.

Absolutely! Please go try this and I will talk to you as much as you want - https://appmap.io/docs/appmap-overview.html

I have one project that's a server application (https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen), but since it uses lots of custom stuff on top of the Spark micro-framework, your plugin would probably not work on it. I imagine it does expect projects to be structured idiomatically for the framework they use, at least to some degree. Spark also doesn't know anything about databases, so that is all custom as well. Oh and I also hacked it a bit with reflection to allow streaming responses.