An alternative to using freestanding applications along with global SDK installations, is to manage your SDK as a West Workspace.
West Workspaces allow you to set up a dedicated SDK around your application, controlled by a West manifest file. This ensures that your application always builds against the same version of the SDK, both on command line and in VS Code.
West Workspaces are structured a little differently from normal freestanding applications, as they introduce a project folder above the application repository, where the SDK and any other dependencies are instantiated. To support the transition to this alternative structure, the Create West Workspace action will initialize a West Workspace around your application source directory, then move your application one level down into an application directory, before initializing the SDK around it.