Maybe VS Code Wasn’t That Bad After All

Progress was always coming for us all. No matter what you do, farmer, baker, soldier, tailor, thing are going to change and alter your role. Time marches on for us all.

I thought software development, changes in programming languages aside, would continue for some time. The only thing that we can guarantee will not change is the fact that change will happen.

There is, however, something that I thought would never change.

That’s the disrespect for VS Code.

So the idea that this has changed is amazing to me. You wake up one day and everyone has started to crawl back to VS Code. Not because it was amazing. Far from it. It’s just that it has managed to remind us how rare “works reasonably well” actually is.

AI Editors Are Having Their Browser Moment

For a long time it felt that each company needed their own browser. Different rendering engines, and they were all good for different use cases.

Then one day we woke up and discovered that they were all Chromium with a different coat of paint. It didn’t matter what brand was on the code.

Now that approach seems to be the way forward for so much software, and it’s the lazy approach. Simply take an existing codebase and fork it.

Take the slew of AI coding agent UIs. They take an existing editor, fork it, whack an AI assistant in the sidebar and they’re done. Flair happens by changing the keyboard shortcuts just to annoy anyone using the end product. Ship and go.

We’ve managed to confuse AI functionality with needing an entirely new editor. That’s a bit of a disaster, all told, because the the editor wars should be over. It’s the AI future, so why are you looking at code at all?

I Actually Like AI

You need to decide what type of coder you are, and what future you are going to live in.

Either you shake your fist at the Cloudflare and demand that everyone goes back to Vim, or you get comfortable with AI and think that the machine should be writing the code.

If you’re in the former group I fear that you aren’t going to be in employment for long. Because AI means that certain parts of the work are faster and faster, leaving you to concentrate on the more interesting problems that AI can’t solve. Changing your IDE isn’t going to change the world no matter what extensions it enables.

And developers don’t want a new editor, and I’ll tell you why. When you’ve spent years learning keyboard shortcuts, configuring extensions and working out how to make your editor behave exactly how you want, replacing it has a cost. These AI forks might be better, but they’re not substantially better.

It’s like we’ve all forgotten the golden rule of software. Software is fantastic and can offer you a fantastic experience and if it doesn’t it shouldn’t exist. Because if it doesn’t offer the wow factor everyone will fall back to the old version and the old way of doing things.

The truth is that AI should be making us better developers, with humans in the loop.

An IDE isn’t required to get AI to do the boring stuff, finding that file you’ve forgotten or writing the tests that need to be there to get you through code review.

As a software developer, I want to spend my time deciding what software should do, working out why something has gone horribly wrong and checking that the machine hasn’t confidently invented a method that doesn’t exist.

You know, software development. And even choosing an IDE isn’t engineering for me. As time goes on, writing code is moving away from software development. Even writing code is moving away from software development.

Maybe Boring Software Is Good

So here it is. If AI can understand my codebase, write code, run tests and fix problems, why does it matter which editor I’m using?

So for those times when you need to inspect the code at a detailed level your focus should be on the code. The thing is, if you want to spend time diverting that focus onto IDE choice, a replacement can’t just be a little bit better. It needs to be so much better that going back feels ridiculous. As usual with software we aren’t close to that (except in new software categories, but that’s a discussion for a different time).

So that’s the problem with the current crop of AI editors. They might be better. Some of them probably are better but, they aren’t better enough.

Which brings us back to VS Code. It’s awful, but it does “just” enough in a world where you don’t need the IDE to change the world. It’s boring, yes, but buckle up because it’s going to happen more and more. By which I mean no one cares about software anymore. Or maybe VS Code wasn’t that bad after all.

Wait, what do both of those points mean for software developers? Answers on a postcard please.

About The Author

Professional Software Developer “The Secret Developer” can be found on Twitter @TheSDeveloper and regularly publishes articles through Medium.com

The Secret Developer spent years complaining about code editors only to discover that “fine” is apparently a feature now.