VS Code

“Like if you really believe in the product, you would never do a plugin because then you're part of somebody else's product. If you really believed in the product, you wouldn't do enterprise early, you do it later, because the product itself is the kind of go-t…”

“Cursor split the store from VS code because they want to, like, create their own ecosystem that's independent, etc. And the way it all plays out Is VS code is like, no, like the package you need to install to do Garmin watch faces. We're going to control that.…”

“The fact that it's open source and it's been able to be forked by, you know, Cursor and Windsurf and others to then layer on this functionality has just made it even more entrenched, I think.”

“If like Cursor or Devon would have to build their own VS code, that'd cost a hundred million dollars, you know? Call me back in five years.”

“This is almost like a vibe coded VS code. That's just pure AI generated. You know, there's not even like a, like not even say you're not using chassis or whatever. Like it's just raw AI.”

“We didn't even fork VS code. We actually built from scratch. So we built IDEA from scratch that we used ourselves as a daily driver. Couple more weeks to actually get into other people's hands. And then in the span of total, I think a couple of months, we had …”

“So at the time, it's not super controversial now, but at the time, people just thought it was very weird to do an editor. Whether it was a fork or not a fork they said you can't get people to switch their code editor. They're too tied to it, which we knew was …”

“And mission control where you will have Codex, you have Claude, you have Grok, every model you want. Yeah. Each working across their own branches, Then you have the IDE, so you can bring up VS code, where you can do the diff on each of the branches output”

“The competitors are typically like VS code clones. They all have a sort of IDE centric approach, or if you're taking a terminal centric approach like cloud code, the most common thing is it's just like a pure text based terminal app.”

“We had, like, an internal poll last week at our company meetup where Beyang was asking who of you uses the CLI and who of you uses VS Code, and it was a fifty-fifty split”

“I don't think that that interaction is a really important way that people are gonna be interacting with AI in six months or 12 months.”

“We thought that, you know, VS Code had been developed over the course of 12 years, was one of the earliest TypeScript projects had lots of people on it. Thought, oh yeah, of course, you can kind of spin something up that's just equivalent for the world in, in …”

“I really don't think of Cursor as a competitor. I think of them as someone that, I mean, we just launched our MCP server to explicitly make it so that you can get your designs into Cursor and Winsurf and all these other, and VS code, you know, all these great …”

“It is a fork of VS Code, and yes, We do know the memes. But there wasn't a need to rebuild everything from scratch.”

“Problem was actually even to show the feature VS code would not expose an API for us to do this. So what we actually ended up doing was dynamically generating PNGs to actually go out and showcase this.”

“We literally couldn't do that. In VS Code.”

“So we garnered a couple million users on our VS Code, JetBrains, Vim, Emacs extensions.”

“Klein's an open source coding agent. It's a VS Code extension right now, but it's coming to JetBrains and NeoVim and CLI.”

“Even though it's a VS Code extension and a coding agent, MCP kind of lets it function as this everything agent where it can connect to, you know, whatever services and things like that. And that's really a side effect of having very general prompts just in the…”

“No, I actually like pity anybody that has to fork VS Code because Microsoft makes it like notoriously difficult to maintain these forks. So a lot of resources and efforts go into just maintaining, keeping your fork up to date with all the updates that VS Code …”

“If somebody asks me what's my favorite product, it's always, you know, VS code is one and the other one is Excel.”

“We actually initially started by building our own editor from scratch, obviously using lots of open source technology, but not, you know, basing it off of VS code, kind of like how browsers are based off of Chromium. It was a little bit more akin to building, …”

“Part of the reason why we, the product experience wasn't as good actually was because we were stuck in VS code. And VS code didn't give us the UI capability to make the product much better.”

“If you were the developer behemoth, which was Microsoft, the fact that you have to do this now to remain relevant at a zoom out level, This is a sign of relative weakness, not absolute weakness.”

“Something that would make me happy is that instead of one more fork of VS code, people just had a great API for surfacing a great agent experience into a tool that was welcoming to that. We don't need to be sharp elbowed about controlling all of that.”

“The first version of Cursor was hand rolled. We now we use VS Code kind of as a base, like many browsers use Chromium as a base and it worked off of that. To begin with, we didn't, and built the prototype of Cursor from scratch, and that involved a lot of work…”

“So VS Code, which is a very popular IDE, had a ceiling for the AI capabilities we could showcase our users. And because of that, we decided to go out and fork VS Code and build our own IDE with some of these new agentic capabilities”

“JetBrains is actually a very sort of extensible product in a way that VS code is not. VS code is not very extensible.”

“We're enabling cursor for the VS Code crowd to be able to use.”

“I think in the future, at some point, my guess is that the IDE is going to become less of the focal point and more like an app that you can launch when you need to dig in deeper, but you spend most of your time away from it. So maybe 80% of your time is in a w…”

“I think, especially on the VS Code Wars, the switching costs being so low, Is, is going to be a challenge for them. You can go from Copilot to Windsurf to Cursor in like five minutes.”

“If we're actually being able to understand the kind of the trajectory of what developers are doing within the editor, right, if we actually are being able to see, like, oh, the developer just went and opened up this part of the directory and tried to view it, …”

“On VS Code, actually, the problem for us wasn't actually being able to implement the feature. We had the feature for a while. Problem was actually even to show the feature, VS Code would not expose an API for us to do this. So what we actually ended up doing w…”

“They use the accessibility features on the Mac app so that they don't need VS codes or text edits permission to go in there and rewrite the code. They just are able to read everything out, rewrite it, and just act as a AI assistant in there.”

“Cursor is a fork of VS code that's made that has really awesome AI tools, but that's an editor. You still need run time. You still need a deployment environment.”

“I just genuinely think that there is a gigantic market that gets unlocked in a step function moment where users decide that they're no longer going to use VS code to write code and send it to their colleagues. They're going to use magic or whoever ends up doin…”

“Somewhere where I disagree with him is that you need to own the IDE. I think like he made kind of some good points about, you know, not having platform risk in the long term, but some of the, you know, features that were mentioned, like suggesting diffs, for e…”

“The real advantage is the end-to-end journey from the first line of code to the deployment, to getting crashes in production, to making edits, to all of that feedback cycle, which typically in most cases is divided between GitHub and VS Code and AWS and all of…”