Slow Customer Service -- Security/Credentialing Issues
I have encountered challenges related to security credentials used by the Tabnine VSCode extension, and communication with the Tabnine Customer Service (CS) team.
Since Tabnine uses email for communication between their CS team and their members, response times have been long. When I do receive a response, the support team confirms my Pro/Dev subscription is active and that there is no problem. However, the VSCode extension occasionally logs in with an old account which has only their discontinued Basic plan, causing access issues. As a consultant, avoiding credentialing issues is critical, especially when working with multiple clients such as government agencies.
From the beginning, I chose to use Google authentication to log in on Tabnine's "Hub" webpage, because it was easier than remembering another login and password (or using a security key), and no sensitive information was being passed. I later found out that parts of Tabnine's system rejects the use of email addresses with the "@gmail.com" domain name, which was not made clear when trying out their service initially. Later, I had to make use of a company account, and I used one which had its own domain but was also making use of Gmail behind the scenes, and thus accessible via Google authentication. This is where the confusion began. Unlike other extension authors, Tabnine does not seem to record account credentials on a per-profile basis, or allow us to specify the credentials we want it to use. On my own, I have discovered that Tabnine will attempt to use the last accessed Google account. I would explain how to overcome this issue, but it can be quite complex, and this is not the right forum for that information.
Until Tabnine can address these issues by allowing users to specify per-profile logins for their extension (to support multiple VSCode profiles), and by improving their CS response times (especially for paying members), I cannot and do not recommend the use of their VSCode AI extension except to log in by entering a username and password which is specific to Tabnine.
