Comment by IshKebab
1 day ago
You mean all of Microsoft's direction? Look at how VSCode changelogs have morphed from editing features to 90% AI.
1 day ago
You mean all of Microsoft's direction? Look at how VSCode changelogs have morphed from editing features to 90% AI.
Thank you, this does not get discussed enough on HN. I used to look forward to monthly releases of VSCode and actually read the changelog carefully to see what new features/enhancements I could make use of. These days I just glance and ignore it completely -- almost everything is Copilot, MCP blahblah. Such a disappointment.
You would think with all the AI magic, they would deliver more "core editor" features/enhancement. No, just more Copilot.
Man this reminds me of the early days of Edge where MS actually made a good browser for a few months and then stuffed it full of bloatware, ads, a crypto wallet (!) and now AI (not even GOOD AI features).
Do you really miss stuff in VS Code's core editor? I mean, coming to think about it, VS Code feels "feature complete", I haven't found in other editors features that I thought "wish I had this in VS Code". Not to justify the whole changelog being about Copilot (isn't it supposed to be a separate extension anyway?), but I guess it's either that or going for a while without updates, or really small changes you'd probably not notice
Just look at open issues, sorted by most thumbs up:
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20st...
One that I am interested in is tree sitter syntax highlighting support: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/50140
There are a ton of things that could be done. The fact that you haven't personally needed more features doesn't mean it's "feature complete". Not even close. You just haven't hit those pain points in your workflow.
Also, look at what May 2024 changelog looks like https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_90
vs most recent one https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_103
Awesome, this is creating an opportunity for a new text editor. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
There is still Emacs, Sublime Text, Brief (oldie but still around), Notepad++,...
The problem are the extensions, I bash Electron all the time, yet I use VSCode almost daily because of certain extensions.
Just switched to Zed because every vscode release breaks more than fixes.
When I get fed up with VSCode, I run Emacs and I feel happy until I start working on something else that can be done a little faster on VSCode because of the available extensions.
I feel like we almost need government intervention to keep GitHub an open commons, but I am a Libertarian and I distrust the government perhaps even more than the tech industry - still an open question for me.
Lock in and control by huge corporations is almost always uniformly bad. I have accepted the message of great books like Privacy is Power, The Tech Coup, and Surveillance Capitalism, and I feel pretty good about just using Google’s Gemini APIs when I need them, and lean as hard as possible on open models running on Ollama and LM Studio. There are also little things you can do like not installing apps and using web apps.
Back to test editors: the Lem Emacs-like editor written in Common Lisp is an interesting project https://github.com/lem-project/lem
GitHub is not, and never has been, an open commons. There has always been a terms of service, and GitHub has been able to remove accounts and repositories at will.
Further, git is made to be decentralized. Having the government take over a business to maintain a centralized source is the peak of absurdity.
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Zed also turned into ai slob already
I don't object to AI features. I just don't want them to only work on AI features. There are plenty of editor related things that they should still be doing. E.g. the ability to show images in the editor. How neat would that be?
I can confidently predict that the breakout dev tool in the next few years will have LLM features, but won’t have forgotten stuff like editing features. As Claude Code has already demonstrated, you do t even need an editor for good LLM integration.