«It uses an architecture where everything is a plugin»
Ok, that's enough for me. I have developped over the year a plugin fatigue.
Every product relying on "community plugins" for their features implies it works fine the 6 first months, then it's a nightmare of incompatible, deprecated, incompatible plugins, with no consistency and no governance.
I understand how attractive it can be to companies to think, hey, let's make a very small product and rely on other people to make features, and I hope it works, but I'm personally staying away from that.
This works pretty well for these coding harnesses though (see Pi). I like the model where the harness ships with minimal tools and you can spin up plugins for extra functionality. You can usually have the model/harness you're using just create the plugin that you need for you. The advantage of this is that these harnesses aren't optimized for their frontier models like claude/codex are so you can fine tune your environment and burn less tokens... having said all that, I haven't tried this one yet.
> Every product relying on "community plugins" for their features implies it works fine the 6 first months, then it's a nightmare
Eclipse has been thriving since 2002 mostly by virtue of being able to coordinate developers via plugin's and a business-friendly license.
They did need to upgrade early plugins into OSGI, and most of the new plugin designs benefit from copying OSGI, et al. The key is SAT solvers for dependencies and namespace separation, not forcing clients into the same dependency version.
But as you suggest, relying on the community is a moral hazard. In Eclipse there were big players willing to fund key use-cases for their own purposes; elsewhere I've seen sufficient monetization of plugins to offer incentives and stability.
I would add that VSCode plugins follow a different development model. While any OSGI/Eclipse plugin can provide an interface, I believe in VSCode you're limited to the API's they give you (and they make a mess of them, so there's more inconsistencies e.g., in LSP support that anyone can enumerate).
Everyone thinks their workflow is a special snowflake.
Truth is that useful dev workflows and tooling probably coalesces in a tight band. There's really no point in re-inventing the wheel over and over again at this level (the raw tooling).
I don't really like about 98% wheels other people made. Usually they do almost what I want and their UX is horrible. And people asked about how could I get the missing parts gleefully respond that I shouldn't want that. And when I'm bothered by UI they say it's fine and it doesn't matter. I'm not completely unique but being cut to size hurts.
Everything about harness design is still experimental and janky. Throw everything in a pit and let the fittest survive. Large opinionated software is unlikely to survive and more likely to give you a migration fatigue
These types of projects can have a happy ending, but only if the product is popular enough and the plugins are essential to the core functionality. Plugins usually die off because the sole maintainer loses interest, but popularity and necessary can bring new maintainers to carry the torch.
Most vendors that create a plugin-based system end up creating a large library of plugins to kickstart the ecosystem, which many users end up trusting those more because they're "official", so they essentially created an mono-vendor ecosystem with extra steps.
Many of the libraries and executables in Linux are cross-compilable with other ecosystems. It's the difference between opening the door to an existing ecosystem and birthing one.
Every product relying on "community plugins" for their features implies it works fine the 6 first months, then it's a nightmare of incompatible, deprecated, incompatible plugins, with no consistency and no governance.
I understand how attractive it can be to companies to think, hey, let's make a very small product and rely on other people to make features, and I hope it works, but I'm personally staying away from that.