Explain 'Inlay Hints' and 'Type Acquisition' in the TS Language Service.

Updated May 4, 2026

Short answer

Inlay hints provide inline visual metadata in the IDE, while Type Acquisition automatically fetches types for JS libraries.

Deep explanation

The TS Language Service powers the developer experience. Inlay hints display inferred types and parameter names directly in the code editor, improving readability without cluttering the source code with annotations. Automatic Type Acquisition (ATA) is a background process that watches your package.json and fetches @types/ packages from npm silently to provide autocompletion for libraries that don't include their own types.

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