VSCode rebrands as "The open source AI code editor"(code.visualstudio.com) |
VSCode rebrands as "The open source AI code editor"(code.visualstudio.com) |
Someday, could right-click a dependency and click "Zero dep," and it updates with a library integrated with the app. Stored in the cloud, other users benefit from the same generated output.
Apps become instances consuming them, the thinnest crust around various baked libs (mantle) or triggering changes in the molten core.
> In certain markets, we use conversation data to train the generative AI models in Copilot, unless you choose to opt-out of such training.
"Build me a SaaS platform exactly like ____"
If agents become as good at long running tasks as we're told they will do by giving Microsoft access to your codebase and inner business processes to give to anyone that wants to the ability to clone your business.
That might end up being inevitable but I see no reason to accelerate that.
You may agree or not with the direction, but at least it’s clearly stated.
If it turns out to be very intrusive, I guess I'll use Clion for my platformio stuff:
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/clion/platformio.html
(since I've already got a Toolbox subscription from them)
and neovim or zed for my blog. That's really all I was using VS Code for anyway.
For at least a couple of years it’s been nothing but AI, I am happy to ignore updates and should probably just turn them off now.
Reminds me of Dan Luu's thread on Microsoft communication style:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30128061 - Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale (2022-01-29, 272 comments)
Thankfully, you can still disable all that garbage and just use it as a text editor.
It would therefore be more honest to say that VSCode is "a visible source LLM code editor".
Is the play here to get everyone hooked on AI and then jack up the price to make a profit?
If so, I worry about Junior devs in particular, who have never developed the skills to write software themselves, suddenly finding themselves being "cut off" from their AI dealer
Or people generally who outsource their thinking to AI, forget how to do things for themselves, and suddenly face a big bill!
It's December 27th, 2025 and I'm not supposed to be thinking about my future*. I'm supposed to spend time with my family and enjoy that. Yet here I sit mulching on this.
* I didn't add 'as a Software Engineer', because I wouldn't know as what else.
There have been a lot of recent changes to VS Code that feel like this: the Copilot pane has been refactored to take up more space and behave less like other composed panes in the window; the integrated terminal now does overly clever and brittle things to introduce suggestions in REPLs like Python’s. Those kinds of changes have pushed me more to Zed recently, which has all of the same AI features but without the user hostility.
The execs want to they're using+selling AI, the investors want to believe AI can theoretically fire all the workers/drop your fixed costs, and the middle managers need to justify that they're on it by myopically pushing out features that increase the AI adoption metric.
The rushed push of AI features obviously trains your users that your AI is useless crap that just gets in the way. If you're going to do it's, make it limited and high quality first.
I'd love to move back to it (or rather, use it for dev work beyond opening large log files to search for things), or atleast have it as a backup for vscode's inevitable enshittification.
Making an editor is anice endeavor. But there are plenty of, which are extremely well developed, open source, in many directions, emacs and vim the most prominent. But many others out there.
For open source GUI text editors there sadly aren't many that match the feature and polish of vscode.
There are so many already and for example NeoVim is great and would allow you to make modifications as you please.
I’m not trying to disprove your argument, rather I’m interested in your motivations
I was recently looking for embedded analytics platforms (and was willing to pay), but the search became incredibly frustrating as every database or analytics tool now brands itself as some AI first thing. The landing pages no longer help me figure out what they do, which I guess is good for raising investor money but I'm sure it can't be good for real sales.
I hope that soon the mania can end and we can get useful branding again.
VSCode to me is better branded as the editor with the best plugin ecosystem around. The AI features should just be plugins to an incredibly flexible editor. But I know MS wants to sell subscriptions like windsurf and cursor.
I don't expect traditional Microsoft to let this going on for much longer, this is the first sign of it.
https://underjord.io/the-best-parts-of-visual-studio-code-ar...
BTW Zed is great and I subscribed just to support them even though I don’t use their cloud. They should charge for it, even a little bit.
(I might try their AI features again but last time I found them less convenient than the other ways.)
Emacs remains the antidote to this. I use Emacs because I want to remain the architect of my development environment, not become the consumer of a telemetry-gathering platform architected by PMs at a big tech company. It is also an absolute joy to use an environment that provides you with the same amount of power as the core maintainers, allowing you to fully inspect and modify the system even while it is running.
But maybe that should change. I like vscode for when I need more IDE features than I care to cobble together with plugins.
I don’t need another subscription in my life. Especially for anything I rely on.
After a couple of months of using Doom, I felt comfortable enough to roll my own config which also helped me better understand how things worked at a lower level. More interestingly, after a couple of years, I transitioned from Evil to standard Emacs bindings as that felt better integrated with the rest of Emacs.
VSCode has slowly been getting more and more bloated, but the alternatives are all very meh or are missing crucial extensions.
We're just out here putting hats on hats.
Package control is still only in the command palette. If you want to explore what's on offer you have to do so on the actual package control site.
Managed to get LSP + intelephense installed so I have good PHP parsing (Other LSP providers appear to be available)... but stuck at the moment trying to get an intellisense analogue setup... Doesn't show up in package control in the program despite showing up on the site.
So right now I have syntax highlighting and errors flagged for a php file... but I don't have anything that can take the fact the class is missing several methods from the interfaces, and stub them out in a few keystrokes.
I’ve set up LSPs, completions, etc and although one needs to read up a little bit at first, i feel that this could finally be a stable platform/ide for once, and i wouldnt need to jump ship every couple of years because of some enshittification.
I've released a number of AI fearures at work, but they're focused on being good at one specific thing.
So Emacs+Vim is the best of both worlds. You get the infinite extensibility of Emacs and a sane(-ish) programming language, with the superior editing and command interface. The beauty of Emacs is that it really doesn't matter how you use it. For some modes you may need to override a keymap, or use a package like evil-collection, but most behave well OOB IME.
[1]: https://docs.platformio.org/en/latest/integration/ide/index....
You are right that VS Code has a "nicer" out of the box UX (this is subjective of course), but Emacs offers a malleable environment. In VS Code, you are limited to what the APIs the developers decided to expose. If you want a specific behavior that isn't supported, you either fork the editor or create a feature request ticket and wait for someone to prioritize it. In Emacs, because you have full access to the internal runtime, you can implement that feature yourself in a couple of lines of Lisp.
Emacs might be a solid editor choice but my intuition is that it probably won't be worth it for the same reason LiteXL wasn't for me. If I do work on adding features to my editor I think I'd be more comfortable doing it in js, html and css. And if possible I'd rather start with a base that's mostly where I want it to be. Trying to turn emacs into vscode sounds like way more of a project than turning Theia or CodeMirror into vscode.
It’s been a while since I used it, but it’s one of the few things I miss on osx
https://github.com/DevelopmentCool2449/visual-emacs
Which didn't really impress me terribly much.