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
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.
It’s been a while since I used it, but it’s one of the few things I miss on osx
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.
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".
VSCode has slowly been getting more and more bloated, but the alternatives are all very meh or are missing crucial extensions.
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.)
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.
> 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.
We're just out here putting hats on hats.
I don't expect traditional Microsoft to let this going on for much longer, this is the first sign of it.
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.
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've released a number of AI fearures at work, but they're focused on being good at one specific thing.
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!
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.
Pepp38•1h ago
You may agree or not with the direction, but at least it’s clearly stated.
misnome•1h ago
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.
hoistbypetard•1h ago
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.
omoikane•58m ago
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)
https://xcancel.com/danluu/status/1487228574608211969