VSCode rebrands as "The open source AI code editor"

[Lio]

This is the bit that gives me pause:

> 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.

[fweimer]

At least they are clear about it: It's an editor for open-source AI code. It's not intended to be used for maintaining internal software projects.

[tonyedgecombe]

I wonder if Microsoft allows its own code to be scanned.

[Pepp38]

I actually respect the move. It’s not subtle, and it’s not trying to please everyone.

You may agree or not with the direction, but at least it’s clearly stated.

[hoistbypetard]

I appreciate the clarity, anyway. I will wait and see how intrusive the AI focus turns out to be.

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.

[misnome]

It’s honest. Time was when the number of improvements in every release was impressive and sometimes radical improvements.

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.

[omoikane]

> It's not subtle, and it's not trying to please everyone.

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

[Apreche]

At least they are being honest. If you look at release notes for the past year or so, almost every improvement is related to co-pilot.

Thankfully, you can still disable all that garbage and just use it as a text editor.

[gradientsrneat]

They still aren't honest about the fact that the official VSCode distribution isn't fully open source because, for example: you can't have VSCodium connect to the official plugin repository. It also isn't the only editor with AI integration, and more specifically these systems use LLMs.

It would therefore be more honest to say that VSCode is "a visible source LLM code editor".

[jmkni]

It does seem to me like Microsoft (and every other company developing AI models) is doing so at a loss, and a signifigant one.

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!

[WolfeReader]

I wouldn't call them "devs" if they can't write software.

[Griffinsauce]

This is 1000% the play, it's the only one that actually works out (for _some_ vendors). Extra fun when you've let go of all your actual experienced engineers and then the squeeze comes.

[OptionOfT]

Well, I don't know what to think anymore. I use LLMs in my work, but I'm not comfortable signing my name on something I don't fully stand by (akin to the responsibility of a lawyer's signature).

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.

[woodruffw]

It’s a rote observation at this point, but: there’s a clear discrepancy between the demonstrated value of LLMs (which is, to be clear, significant!) and the aggressive manner in which Microsoft has introduced them into their products. The latter is what you do when you can’t demonstrate value, and it produces worse outcomes by design (because it starts from the assumption that users need to be given the stick instead of the carrot).

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.

[data-ottawa]

I think a lot of this is just crappy bonus and incentive structures.

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.

[bobajeff]

I love vscodium but more and more I worry about how Microsoft is effecting it down stream. To the point where I'm actively looking into making my own editor. I'm putting it off for now but I'll probably start playing around with Theia and Codemirror on the side just in case.

[abhishek99]

There are very performant and capable options like SublimeText out there https://www.sublimetext.com/

[catapart]

same boat. I switched to codium mostly out of purity from AI, and I'd really like it to stay that way, while still getting other QoL improvements. I'm pretty concerned that there's not enough to justify the niche, though.

[f1shy]

If I have to bet, I will absolutely go for MS enshitifying it beyond reasonable usability, in one way or another, more soon than later.

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.

[Crowberry]

Why would you look to make your own code editor?

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

[data-ottawa]

This type of branding makes it impossible to find products lately.

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.

[civancza]

I am in the embedded analytics space, so it caught my eyes :D what are u looking for in a platform?

[lukax]

I guess there's a lot of pressure from Cursor and Google's Antigravity. Also with Zed you can bring your own API key which VS Code didn't support for a long time.

[pjmlp]

Eventually they will need to come up with their own editor and plugins.

I don't expect traditional Microsoft to let this going on for much longer, this is the first sign of it.

[yencabulator]

VSCodium is the open source VSCxxx editor.

https://underjord.io/the-best-parts-of-visual-studio-code-ar...

https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

[api]

I like that Zed has a disable all AI option. I use AI a little but prefer to use terminal based assistants or just cut/paste to a chat.

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.)

[achyudh]

This pivot sounds like VS Code is moving from a text editor to a thin client for AI services that Microsoft wants to push. It is one more step towards a future where our development tools (just like everything else on our computers these days) are just thin clients/wrappers around SaaS.

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.

[mingus88]

My path in the emacs/vi divide forked a lifetime ago, and emacs is so fundamentally different that it was never worth sacrificing the massive productivity vim gives me to dip back into emacs

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.

[yarn_]

Nice, this finally solves my "waffling between vscode & neovim" problem

[bluelightning2k]

Curious what the market share is for vscode Vs its derivatives

[hylaride]

I would not be surprised if the market share breakdown is similar to browsers (eg 70+ percent - more if you ignore that safari is the only real option on iOS).

VSCode has slowly been getting more and more bloated, but the alternatives are all very meh or are missing crucial extensions.

[bicepjai]

I loved vscode, but recently performance has been horrible like during right our in middle of longer agentic development. Call out to zed, please include Jupyter notebook views. Only reason i use vscode is for opening ipynb files.

[Sytten]

Cursor has been annoying me lately with their updates breaking ever further away from vscode UI. Might give copilot another shot. Needs a plan mode though, it really is necessary for complex operations.

[ChrisArchitect]

This isn't that new - "rebrand" somewhere back about 6 months ago; and first half of year at least was "Your code editor. Redefined with AI.".

[pancsta]

Im very happy they dont call it an IDE, which it isnt.

[morkalork]

It isnt?

[etchalon]

Even if you're not using VSCode, you're probably using VSCode.

We're just out here putting hats on hats.

[chrisjj]

Complete with grammar error. Even Google search "AI" knows about that hyphen.

[brcmthrowaway]

How is Sublime Text in 2024?

[tehbeard]

Jumped back to it to try seeing how functional it'd be as something more than than large logfile explorer.

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.

[poisonborz]

Rather than good I would say "same". Excellent text editor, very barebones for actual development work.

[fph]

Do you mean "end of 2025"?

[robin_reala]

As good as it’s ever been, which for me is considerably better than VS Code.

[tacker2000]

Im glad i moved from vscode to neovim last year, and since one month i’ve switched over to emacs, running doom (which gives you vim commands and much more).

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.

[RadiozRadioz]

I bet they're "built from the ground up for AI"

[pjmlp]

So the war is finally declared on all VSCode forks.

[linkage]

THE open source AI code editor? Are they pretending that Zed does not exist?

[turtleyacht]

AI-code editor or AI code-editor? Future versions may include traversing gigabytes of code, supervising hundreds of agents, and peer-to-peer (P2P) content-addressed caching.

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.

[stefanfisk]

What future versions will most likely include is even more broken basic functionality like tab completion.