This is why open-source maintainers burn out and we can't have nice things. Honestly, people, please consider the human on the other side of the toxic discourse.
That was the wrong way to do it. The feature should have been disabled with an actual, clear toggle that shows that it is. This blew up in the developers face for a good reason.
If you leave the field empty (open to accident) and you don't press this button in this function that you may use for other things (open to accident) it doesn't send data where you didn't expect it to. This is functionally equivalent to you can accidentally send data you didn't mean to. This is simply prevented with a real toggle to disable the function.
I don't know about you, but I have clicked on things I didn't mean to because I lost where the mouse is, or because I'm giving a window focus again, it is not an accident that doesn't happen.
It doesn't do anything at all unless you actively engage with it. This is sophistry at its finest.
> Put anything in the box for the OpenAI key, valid or not, and the functionality to send data to OpenAI is active.
No it isn't. Nothing happens until you bring up the Codecierge toolbox and type in a question.
Also, from your later comment:
> 'prompt to use OpenAI' is not OpenAI specific, it is a new button in a previous function that you could use in earlier versions
You just made that one up, the Codecierge UI is entirely new.
Who knows if there was a deal made under the hood