What is VS Code doing?

I have been a VS Code user for many years now. It was a soft landing from Atom (RIP), and there haven't been any significant features from other editors that have tempted me away. I have never experienced the performance issues that others have cited. It wasn't always as cool as the competitors, but it worked and worked well. Until recently.

This week VS Code started adding Co-authored-by: Copilot <copilot@github.com> to my commit messages automatically when commiting from the UI. In two instances that I documented at work, the commits included zero generative AI. But Copilot got the attribution anyway. In a world with increasing contributions from AI, it is important to me that any messaging about AI use is clear and accurate. This is not, and I'm disappointed that any decision makers working on VS Code thought that this was a reasonable default.

Then VS Code broke Intellisense – far and away its most valuable feature. Instead of providing the fast and intuitive help that users have come to expect, they have conceded to AI-powered Inline Suggestions. Previously the two systems were battling for supremacy, but the result was usually reasonable: Intellisense when it detected something and Inline Suggestions when it couldn't. It was a détente that I could live with. But now Inline Suggestions seem to have won the war at the expense of users. Most painful to me are the loss of snippets and automatic imports.

At one point in time VS Code was the undeniable king of cross-platform code editors. Then AI took over the engineering world and forks drew some folks away. I've enjoyed a lot of the AI-focused features that VS Code has implemented over the years – he first few generations of GitHub Copilot were truly magic and transformative for my work. But these most recent changes feel like crossing the Rubicon. The progress ad cacatum has begun and there is no going back.

I'm writing this in exile from Zed. I don't want to be here; I want my editor back. But I'm afraid that the writing is on the wall. /Lamentation

Sean McPherson works as a software engineer at Khan Academy, and enjoys playing games and watching soccer. He lives with family in Pittsburgh, PA.