tl;dr: VSCode's remote SSH editing doesn't just piggyback on the shell like Emacs' Tramp — it stages a Bash script that downloads a Node binary and installs a persistent agent, which then opens a WebSockets channel back to the front-end capable of roaming the filesystem, editing files, and spawning PTYs. The author (from Fly.io) notes this behavior resembles malware and is especially concerning on dev servers or during production incidents, particularly as LLM coding agents proliferate on top of VSCode forks.