[slightwinder]

> It's not just the .vscode folder though, the Python extension for example executes code in order to provide language services.

Which code? Its own Code (which the user already trusts anyway), or code from the workspace (automatically)? My expectation with a language-server is that it never code from the workspace in a way which could result in a side effect outside the server gaining understanding about the code. So this makes little sense?

[HALtheWise]

Your expectation is wrong in this case for almost all languages. The design of Pylance (as is sorta forced by Python itself) chooses to execute Python to discover things like the Python version, and the Python startup process can run arbitrary code through mechanisms like sitecustomize.py or having a Python interpreter checked into the repo itself. To my knowledge, Go is one of the few ecosystems that treats it as a security failure to execute user-supplied code during analysis tasks, many languages have macros or dynamic features that basically require executing some amount of the code being analyzed.