Dear Microsoft: Stop sticking your AI in my IDE

opinion Jul 20, 20264 mins Visual Studio Code is my indispensable development tool. Please, please, please stop making it only about AI and agents. Dear Microsoft, I don’t want to have a love-hate relationship with Visual Studio Code, but you’re making it really hard. Once upon a time, Visual Studio Code was just an editor. You configured it with add-ons to make it do whatever job you needed. And that was great! I gravitated towards using VS Code for multiple jobs in various languages. I could set up a Python workflow with extensions to add database-wrangling functionality. I could put together an environment for digital book publishing. I could even set up a project for screenwriting! (Yes, I have a screenplay in progress. A man can dream.) Now, it’s not like all this went away yesterday. I can still do all of the above. But literally every new feature in VS Code these days is all about agents, AI, and LLMs. It makes me wonder if there’s anyone left in the building who is working on the actual editor anymore. In the release notes for VS Code 1.127, literally every single new feature save one was about agents and AI. Ditto the version before that. The version before that was a little better, but the trend has been clear for some time now: Visual Studio Code is fast becoming an agent front end first, and everything else is a distant second. One argument I’ve heard is that VS Code is now a mature project. Because there just isn’t much left to be done to improve the core, you have directed your attention towards other features that will attract new users. And because agent-and-AI mania is still burning through the enterprise (and everyone’s budgets), agent-and-AI features are the order of the day. But do these features really need to be IDE-level features? Instead of drastically retooling VS Code to support agents, and making AI features native elements of the IDE, shouldn’t the real mission be to support VS Code’s native extensibility? After all, VS Code was built to be extended, and thousands of AI add-ons — including GitHub Copilot and dozens of your own extensions — already take advantage of that. Is all this really about what AI features VS Code can support natively, or is it more about making VS Code a default first point of contact for agents and AI — specifically GitHub Copilot? Is this less about developer convenience, and more about guaranteeing — however obnoxiously — that agents and AI tools always have a central place in VS Code? Whatever the goal is, if you think every VS Code user wants an “agentic development environment” instead of an IDE, I think you’re dead wrong. No doubt AI tools are here to stay. But I do think they will experience a reckoning. Frontier models that do everything and six more things on top of that are becoming of real use only to the big vendors who stick API tollbooths in front of them and construct wetland-devouring data centers the size of the Vegas strip to power them. The future looks more like smaller, locally-hosted models that handle highly specialized tasks and require far fewer resources to train, deploy, and serve. (Even you seem to be moving in that direction, with the Aion on-device models.) The deeper we go into that reckoning, the less it makes sense to have cart-before-the-horse arrangements like VS Code’s native AI features. How long before these features get hoisted back out of VS Code and moved to an add-on (albeit one we get nagged to install every time we fire up our IDE)? Sooner rather than later, I’d bet. Still, until that fine day comes, I’m resigning myself to the idea that my current favorite editor will be stuffed with more and more AI features, whether or not they even make sense in my use case, for a long, wearying time to come. At least I can turn all that stuff off. For now. As I was writing this (in VS Code, no less), I got an update to VS Code 1.128. There’s one nice feature in there I could see myself using quite widely: the ability to register OS-level keyboard shortcuts. But the rest? All AI, all agents, all the time. Serdar Yegulalp is a senior writer at InfoWorld. A veteran technology journalist, Serdar has been writing about computers, operating systems, databases, programming, and other information technology topics for 30 years. Before joining InfoWorld in 2013, Serdar wrote for Windows Magazine, InformationWeek, Byte, and a slew of other publications. At InfoWorld, Serdar has covered software development, devops, containerization, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, winning several B2B journalism awards including a 2024 Neal Award and a 2025 Azbee Award for best instructional content and best how-to article, respectively. He currently focuses on software development tools and technologies and major programming languages including Python, Rust, Go, Zig, and Wasm. Tune into his weekly Dev with Serdar videos for programming tips and techniques and close looks at programming libraries and tools. More from this author Show me more