Development Containers are supposed to liberate your development environment from a specific local installation, like container technology liberated your runtimes (a.k.a YAMLed them into Docker or Kubernetes).

Development != Runtime

Containerization for development has some overlap and quite some difference to containerization for production:

Topic	Development	Production
Mutability	You alter container content	Container is static
Network	Use internal network	Use internal network
Access	Developer tools++	Browser / App
Containers	multiple	multiple
Volumes	primary container binds projectdir all others mount only	all: bind or mount
Configuration	devcontainer.json, docker-compose.yml	docker-compose.yml,Helm Chart
Scope	Runtime & Tooling	Runtime
Dockerfile	Setup development environment	Configure production

Insights

• There are many getting started resources available: here, here, here, here and here. They are working examples, commonly strong on what and how, but light on why
• There are plenty of templates to learn by example
• There seem to be substantial differences how it works on different platforms, subtle and annoying
• On macOS (14.4.1) with with the devcontainer plugin 0.364.0 mount binds would not work in auxiliary containers, only in the main app
• I couldn't find any descrption which subset of docker-compose.yml is supported
• The most interesting templates, for now, live on the Microsoft Artifact Registry, when you know how to look. Starting with those saves you tons of time and frustration
• You will love code --list-extensions to figure out the extensions you have in your vscode (unless you are a code n00b and don't have any)