Agentic Coding and the Weakness of Extensions for IDEs

A few weeks ago we got a warning about extension marketplaces. The reported story was that a cryptocurrency developer, using the Cursor AI IDE (which is a fork of Visual Studio Code) noticed that he was short a considerable amount of cryptocurrency; about half a million dollars worth. What happened? He realised his development system had been hacked and so he asked investigators to help.

The malicious code was traced to a VS Code extension, that ostensibly added Solidity language support — which is used for writing smart contracts within