I feel like VSCode is falling apart Not just VSCode, but other pieces of software I always use, not sure if that's related to AI, but this genuinely upsets me. I would expect things to be better as AI helps accelerate development and bug reports and whatnot, but it looks like the opposite is actually happening... which is concerning. |
I don't use vscode because it's always felt heavy on my (older) machine.
Zed seems to work okay. Curious to know how it compares
I can't tell how much less resources it uses - haven't really tested that. To be fair to VSCode often times biggest resource hog is various language servers.
I am planning a KL->HKG trip with a friend and failed to book an AirAsia flight because their website doesn't allow it. Their Mobile app (a wrapper around their web app?) also crashes when moving to payment. I ended up taking a Hong Kong Express flight (price was quite close) but then my friend had an error on the HKE website and couldn't complete the booking.
Fun times.
I remember the - today we would say shitstorm - negative buzz when JetBrains evolved from one IDE with Plugins to many IDEs with language specific plugins and introducing a subscription based model where all where available.
So more than 15 years, but since then nothing beat them and it is my longest running subscription. I benefitted many years of the early rabat that people got when they joined the subscription mode. Many years JetBrains spared the early joiners of price increases, which was cool.
Before that people would have bought IntelliJ for a hefty price tag, but it was fair.
Fortunately JetBrains never lost their focus and goal. I was so glad that JetBrains seemed to give AI a pass until they saw a way to let users benefit from its utilization. My guess is, that an Agent AI IDE is in the works, kind of like DataSpell and DataGrip.
Nothing bad to say about JetBrains, and I didn't get all the buzz about VSCode. Plugin-System was a mess, not a strength, highly conflicting, while of course some were really nice to have but not really thought through or tested on devs for productivity.
Especially in the beginning VSCode feels really handy, but was an annoyance over the long run. Plugins broke, security. Also in team environments and especially large to very large amounts of teams VSCode is hell due to no possibility to enforce plugins via policy - at least at the time I tried around 2020.
JetBrains have the added benefit of simply working consistently and I find it helpful to not have a superapp for all programming languages integrated into one but separate instances with distinct features depending on the language context.
JetBrains IDEs are used to build stuff that is reliable and the fact they they have to earn money it great: the customer is the focus, not a community of people cheerleading only.
I had the honor to talk to the product lead of VSCode (he joined Google) around 2024. We talked for over an hours exchanging ideas and insights, stories from the trenches. Nice dude.
I don't bad mouth VSCode, it just doesn't click for me for the professional usage for the most popular programming languages.
A perfect fit however, was in a niche, where nothing from JetBrains could match it: - M68k programming for Amiga 500 - 6510 assembler for C64 demo coding
Turbo Pascal was very buggy and disappointing, but VSCode is unmatched and top notch when it comes to Amiga and C64 coding cross platform.
VSCode might retain old-school developers but it will keep shrinking.
I’m effectively forced to use VS Code, because of work. If it wasn’t for this situation I would I would have already moved away from it, or never started using it in the first place.