Feature Flags in VSCode

We're super excited about our new Editor Tools! When Jeffrey first starting hacking around with the LSP we each had one of those whoa moments where you feel like you're seeing things in a whole new light.

I love being in my editor, but everything about Feature Flags has always required me to leave. We spent the past month asking "what would it be like to do it all from the editor?" and I love where we ended up.

Feature Flag Autocompletion

First up, the autocomplete feature for feature flags. A mistyped feature flag is a terrible thing and pretty annoying to debug since they default to false. Let your editor help with that. Autocomplete for flag and config names, and auto-create simple flags if the flag doesn't exist yet.

Evaluations on Hover

Writing the feature flag is often the easy part. The real question comes later. Is this thing on? Can I delete it? What value is set in production?

We wondered how excellent it would be to bring our evaluation data right into the editor and our answer is... very excellent! No more leaving your editor to answer a simple question. A simple hover, and you’ve got all the info you need.

In this picture you can see that the flag is true in staging and test, false in dev and a 66% rollout to true in production. And it looks like it's working too. Data over the past 24 hours shows that 67% of users are seeing the feature.

Personal Overrides

Grimace if you've ever committed if true || flags.enabled? "myflag" to version control. It's easy to do. You want to see what happens when a flag is enabled, but setting the flag is annoying or will change it for everyone, so you cheat and put a raw true in front of your flag and then forget to take it out.

What would be a better way? Well, could I just click on the flag and set it to true? Of course it should only be true for me on my personal machine so I don't screw anyone else up. That sounds nice right?

This personal overrides feature is tied to you developer account, so no more global toggles causing chaos. Set your value, test your feature, all without leaving your coding groove.

Learning More About LSPs

We've been learning a ton about Language Server Protocols (LSPs) lately. Jeffrey's been on a roll, sharing his insights on creating LSPs with tutorials like writing an lsp in bash and lsp zero to completion.

We're not just building these tools for you; we're building them for us, too. We're genuinely jazzed about these new features and the difference they're making in our coding lives.

Give these new tools a spin and let us know what you think. We'd love to hear about what else you think would make the in-editor experience for feature flags brilliant. Don't use VSCode? Don't worry, we're working on the other editors too. Go here to get notified about new editor releases.