The missing piece is that the IDE runs on the same environment as your code (0). This is useful, for instance, to communicate with the various LSP services [1]

The missing piece is that the IDE runs on the same environment as your code (0). This is useful, for instance, to communicate with the various LSP services [1] VS Code may need in order to provide proper support (auto-completion and all sorts of other IDE features). I mean, even something as simple as "Run this file" may not work if you just mount the folder somehow. There are other goodies but those are very VS Code specific, like the ability to describe which extensions are used on the DevContainer, that way you can very quickly have everyone in your team use the same extensions and also avoid having a globally installed extension that you only need for a single one of your projects. -- 0: not the GUI part, a daemon. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Server_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Server_Protocol