Our plan is to deprecate the built-in debugging functionality in favour of this separate extension. Please give it a try and let us know if everything works as expected. We plan to support older versions in the near future. This extension is available in preview as a pre-release version using the latest version of debugpy. By keeping the debugger separate from the Python extension, you will eventually be able to use the latest version of the Python extension while using an older version of the debugger (by disabling extensions auto-update). To work towards a solution for this, we have created a separate Python Debugger extension called Debugpy. When support for Python 2.7 and Python 3.6 were removed from the Python extension, we received a lot of feedback from users who were unable to upgrade their codebase to the latest versions of Python and lost the ability to debug their applications with the latest versions of the Python extension.

If you have any issues with this new extension or wish to provide feedback, please file an issue in the Mypy extension GitHub repo.