[MrJohz]

I don't use VSCode as my editor, but I found out recently you can open the AI agent sidebar as a separate window, and it's been fantastic - it's mostly replaced Claude Code and other similar TUI tools. It's not quite full integration, but the UI is so much easier to use, because you can be more precise. Rather than having a global "more information" toggle that expands everything like in Claude Code or Pi or whatever, I can specifically inspect the bits of information that I'm interested in. There's two parallel subagents running and one of them is doing unusual things? I can explore exactly what it's doing in more detail.

It helps that VSCode has really improved in the last couple of releases - before then, the features available in Claude Code were useful though that it was worth using despite the baggage, and there's still a handful of things I miss in VSCode. But I think the visual information density and acuity that you can get out of a GUI application is far beyond what you can ever achieve in a TUI, and I think as these tools start reaching something like feature parity, that makes GUIs a lot nicer to use.