AICode: A VSCode methodology for long-term maintainable AI coding
marketplace.visualstudio.com
marketplace.visualstudio.com
> One day I had a subtle bug: the app couldn’t load an index file living under WSL. I asked an AI for help. At first it answered with vague explanations I didn’t really understand. After pushing it to be explicit, I eventually realized what it was suggesting: "fix" the issue by deleting the index file whenever loading it fails.
> I challenged it: "So your plan is: we spend an hour indexing data, save a persistent index, and if we can’t reload it later, we just delete it and start over? That’s like Word saving a document… and then opening an empty file next time. That’s not a fix, that’s a destructive workaround." After more pressure, the bot finally admitted that yes, this was its plan, and backed off.
Even the (supposed) quote of yourself in your story is AI generated, I'm not even sure what to say at this point
> The AI can propose ideas, but it never silently edits your codebase or ships a destructive "fix" behind your back.
I don't know of any widely used tool that "silently edits your codebase"
> AICode is designed to be transparent, to acknowledge its limits, and to work with you to reach a reliable result.
Considering the general vagueness in the description, I will assume you haven't found a novel way of aligning models/enforcing guardrails, and "designed to" is just a fancy way of saying "instructed to"
> AICode does not upload your whole codebase contents to the cloud, because it runs primarily on your machine, connects directly to the OpenAI API servers, and sends only selected source code extracts
That is, in fact, "the cloud™", and every other tool already does this.
Yes there are real differences with copilot/continue/cc: Detailed specifications, AI refinements, AI verifications, and a lot of system instructions yes that's what i mean by instructed, to make the communication with the AI easier.
Yes I have used AI to help me write the README. So i'm an AI user smh ? But the story is true and I have more like this, but I have removed most of the uninteresting text from the description, because yes you're right it was too long.
And I was able to write a 500K LOC app using this methodology and it's maintainable. Can Copilot/Continue/CC do this ? I have tried and they generated crap that's unmaintainable long term. Did you succeed writing a big app with these tools ? I did not but maybe it's possible ?
My app doesn't have downloads any way. So you must be right: It seems useless. Yet it made a difference for me. I don't know...
It started as a manual workflow on ChatGPT.com: assembling prompts in a notepad, iterating on specifications, self-checks before and after coding. Once the system became reliable, I packaged it into a VSCode extension.
The goal is not speed, but producing structured, high-quality, long-term maintainable software using AI. I use it in my own projects, including apps of 500K LOC.
Looking for feedback from devs who care about AI-assisted development and code quality.