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Opening the VS Code inside VS code? I would feel watched, like my VS Code is wondering what the hell I'm doing.

Is it not good enough for me? Is it failing me in some awful way that I feel compelled to change it? Maybe it should get out of the IDE business if its not good enough? Maybe become a farmer, take a break from technology

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Or you can think about it as looking under the hood of a car, or taking apart an iPhone to appreciate the beauty. But I do love the irony. I imagine people have run binary decompilers on the decompilers themselves before.

I remember the tale someone fuzzing the same fuzzer to find bugs. I can't find the link though.

General tools like an editor, a decompiler, or even an image editor can be used to modify the software itself. After all, if you're the creator of the tool itself, most likely you feel comfortable using it.

What I always wonder is how people built the first tools. How did people compile the first version of GCC? How did people build the first programming language? How did people built the first OS? I can imagine ways to solve these, but I guess the tale behind how they did it is what makes me wonder.

The general term is "Bootstrapping" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)

Generally you start with "something smaller/easier" and build your way up.

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