Currently, we have the below ways of providing extension recommendations

• The ones committed to the repo by project owners (workspace recommendations)
• The ones based on the files opened by the user
• The ones based on installed software on the user's machine
• The ones we deduce based on extension usage by others who have worked on the same repo

There is no way for a user to opt-out of this experience

This issue is to track the feature request to

• add setting extensions.showRecommendationsOnlyOnDemand. If set to true, this disables the pro-active fetching of extension recommendations.
• retain the command Extensions: Show Recommendation Extensions so that even when this setting is in use, explicit running of the "Show recommendations" will show the recommendations
• disabling recommendations via this setting should disable the recommendation prompts too