OK. So relying on unsaved buffers long-term might still be less safe than in BBEdit, assuming Microsoft hasn’t made improvements that prevent this sort of scenario from happening again.

However, it definitely wasn’t out of sheer negligence, as they do have tests that try to ensure unsaved data will make it from the last stable version to the current version at all times. Without doing any serious research, all I can say is that it is unfortunate, but if you don’t keep unsaved buffers and changes for long periods of time it is at least fairly safe...

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/test/smoke/src...

I think this is the sort of thing where trust is lost after just once, never to be regained. Sort of like if someone lies to you, you can never trust them again, because they've done it once.

I think think because software is so new, and the choices are still so slim, many are much more lenient than they would be with a human.

However, as it matures, and there are more choices, we can regain the freedom to exclude any software from our lives after it misbehaves just once, and still have plenty of choices.

Personally, I've given up on Mac, and before that iOS, and before that Windows, and I'm so much happier, because I have invested that time into choices which do not let me down.

I've done the same with dishonest services, too. No more LinkedIn, their emails forever trashbinned.

But like people, the circumstances matter. VSCode dropping the ball once has to be weighed against why it happened, what they were doing to prevent it from happening, etc. If it happened more, you’d lose trust in that feature, but it’s hard to leave something over a single feature that’s buggy. I can’t think of another text editor I’d rather be using.

For me, I don’t rely on this feature because I normally save anything that I want to keep for longer than a day. My PoV is that anything that isn’t backed up is already lost, so if it really matters, I need more than just hoping my software and hardware won’t fail. Dropping unreliable software is still always an improvement, but if I dropped every piece of software that ever failed me, I would have no software.