Guy Gregory

Back in 2024, I messaged Erich Gamma about the idea of a VS Code documentary. Two years later, it just went live: youtu.be/kHL3XzjpT5w Back then, a lot of the online conversation was about Cursor forking VS Code, GPT-4 and AI assisted coding. AI in the editor pretty much meant helping you to write code faster. The art of coding was alive and well. The team started working on what would eventually become VS Code in 2011, so I always knew there was a big origin and growth story to tell. But of course exploring the AI shift naturally mattered too. What I didn’t realize was that after every interview and chunk of editing, something new would happen that would make me consider reshooting or reshaping the story. Agentic workflows, claude code, codex, next edit suggestions, agent mode, the agents window. Close your eyes and you’ve missed two model releases. There’s talk about coding being solved. We’ve all become a little desensitized to the pace of it, but imagining this landscape two years ago would have been wild. All of a sudden, competition meant not just new players but also new ways of building applications and VS Code has had to evolve. What started as an origin to present day story became way more complicated, because the present day context just wouldn’t sit still. In the end you have to make some compromises and narrative decisions to keep things timeless. Going deep into modern features risked making it feel dated days after release. So you double down on the story of what got VS Code here and accept that the AI chapter might just be a snapshot in time, more commentary than the “this is what we did, how and why” approach the rest of the documentary is built around. Maybe VS Code isn’t the most popular thing on Twitter today. And maybe writing code is a dying art. But i think the impact VS Code has had on software development, the architectural and ecosystem bets that got it here, and the openness the team demonstrated through things like LSP, the Dev Container spec, its extension ecosystem and becoming one of Microsoft’s major open source projects deserved to be celebrated. Also, tech twitter is a bubble. Millions of developers still use @code and I definitely wouldn’t bet against that team. I really, really enjoyed telling this story. And as much as I’m happy it’s finally out and I can move on with my life, I’m going to miss the weekly chats with Erich, following VS Code's every move and pretty much feeling like part of the team. To @ErichGamma, @kaimaetzel, @alexdima123, @BenjaminPasero, Johannes Rieken, Dirk Bäumer, @joaomoreno, @chrisdias, @BrigitMurtaugh, @njukidreborn, @luabud14, SteVen Batten, @MeganRogge_, Bhavya U, Elsie Nallipogu, @burkeholland, André Weinand, @roblourens, @joyceerhl, @Tyriar, Shanku Niyogi, @shanselman, @amandaksilver, @TSteveLuc, Julia Liuson, @oegerikus, @addyosmani, @wesbos, @rakyll, @eamodio, @bolinfest, Stephen Kreyenbuhl, @maxandersen, @GorkemErcan, @svenefftinge and @csweichel: thank you for telling the story of VS Code. And thank you to @msdev, @github, @MetaforDevs, @RedHat, @GitKraken, @ona_hq and @ag_grid for making all of this possible. @JamesMontemagno, Anna Soracco and @cynthiazanoni, thank you for all your help sharing it with the world. It’s been fun. Happy coding everyone ❤️