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Cade's Dotfiles

The same VS Code / Cursor extensions report `fail` on every upgrade run

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Source: Troubleshooting reference

Symptom: bootstrap.sh upgrade logs fail <ext-id> for a fixed set of extensions, run after run — yet the extensions are installed and working in the editor. Install mode never reports them.

Root cause: upgrade mode used to reinstall each declared extension with --install-extension <id> --force, which re-resolves the ID against the editor’s marketplace. Two categories can never satisfy that:

  • Extensions the editor now bundles. VS Code ships github.copilot-chat built in (0.59.0); the marketplace copy is older (0.48.1) and the CLI refuses the downgrade outright: is a built-in extension … and cannot be downgraded.
  • IDs the marketplace doesn’t carry. Cursor resolves against Open VSX, so Microsoft-proprietary IDs fail with Extension '<id>' not found even when the extension is installed — Cursor imported it from VS Code on first run, a path the CLI can’t reproduce. nvidia.nsight-vscode-edition is refused explicitly: not available in Cursor for the Mac Silicon.

Confirm — run the install by hand to reproduce the marketplace error reported by the now-failing bootstrap step:

Terminal window
code --install-extension <id> --force      # or: cursor --install-extension …

Fix: update the checkout and rerun. vscode.sh / cursor.sh now upgrade with a single --update-extensions bulk pass instead of per-extension --force, which only touches what the editor can actually resolve. Drop bundled extensions from packages/vscode-extensions.txt, and keep IDs Open VSX can’t serve out of packages/cursor-extensions.txt (that file’s header lists the known-unavailable set and the Anysphere forks to use instead).