I need to column "lock" in VSCODE

What are Cobol Tags? This? - https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/developer-for-zos/16.0.x?topic=preferences-setting-task-tags - just asking for a friend who uses Visual Studio Code but has never written a single line of Cobol.

What I highlighted in the red box in the above image. They are used to denote line changes from original programs. Our legacy system does not have this problem as it knows how to deal with them because it was designed for cobol.

Note that some dialects (at least ACUCOBOL-GT) uses those for conditional compilation (you can explicit comment lines out/in "as part of preprocessing" with a given tag, the rest stays unchanged)

I'm quite sure that vscode as no builtin function to protect specific columns, but guess that an extension could listen to events and adds spaces before col 72 if an earlier line change deletes / removes them if characters were added.

... or someone could write an extension / sed/awk script run with an "at save" scope, which aligns those.

Do you need these tags? Otherwise, you might just remove them from the code.