Vscode Rebrands as "the Open Source AI Code Editor"

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.

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.

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.

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.

Curious what the market share is for vscode Vs its derivatives

How is Sublime Text in 2024?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

So the war is finally declared on all VSCode forks.

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.

[delayed]

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

We're just out here putting hats on hats.

[delayed]

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.)

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.".