Agentic coding deserves more than a chat box bolted onto VS Code | Hacker News Reader

Agentic coding deserves more than a chat box bolted onto VS Code

github.com

95 pointsevanklem200440 comments

This might be one of the strangest product video editing decisions I've seen.

Has there ever been an IDE demo video with better music?

The intro to Erlang: The Movie has a pretty boss anthem. (if you squint, Erlang/OTP is kind of an IDE, when you live in the REPL) https://youtu.be/xrIjfIjssLE

That video is the perfect amount of awkward. I love it.

10x productiviteit!

It's actually an original piece of music that I custom made for the demo so I am glad you liked it : )

Yeah, it has me wondering why this project is trying to entertain me with a video.

It is strange which is why it is great. So refreshing to not see another instance of corporate videoslop.

Haven’t commented in years but I came to say this is an incredible video.

I think the uncanny valley of this video as a makeshift 90s infomercial captures the audience and sells the product!

Caveat: vaporwave is one of my favorite genres so take this with a grain of salt.

I am very glad you enjoyed it. I am definitely a fan of uncanny valley vibes too, maybe that Backrooms movie subconsciously influenced me when I made the demo. With all of my open source projects I try to have as much fun with it as possible and I definitely had fun making that video.

Is this just a vibe-coded IDE? The tagline "Modular IDE designed for agentic coding" and description don't really summarize what this does differently, and I'm not looking at a video to figure that out.

The video seems to be about mushrooms.

The "have it your way" made me think about hamburgers, can't remember how/why though.

Burger King: https://youtu.be/KJXzkUH72cY

Something I’ve realized lately is that AI makes some things so easy (like video generation) that you’re not required to do the hard work of planning and reflection that might occur with a more involved task. We’ve always been susceptible to rushed thinking but AI compounds this significantly.

Yes, 90% of software in HN main page these days are vibe coded slop that no one uses.

if someone would give me 60bn to put a chatbox in vscode I would happily do it

don't forget to fork and rename a chinese llm

I just need shells — no IDE integration whatsoever. I work across several large codebases in Xcode, Android Studio, and Visual Studio, and I don't want anything wired into them; I just want shells running alongside, exactly like git. Forced docked windows here and there don't help. The best thing about Codex and Claude Code is that I can spin up as many shells as I want and work on as many bugs and features as I can handle in parallel.

Like with most full products that are vibecoded, there's very little to no originality in this - just strange packaging of things that already exist.

Repackaging of existing concepts is kind of just what a lot of new tech products are, right?

But the ones that repackage as part of improvement are the ones that usually stick. Repackaging as a lesser product only works if your brand strength is being cheap.

no argument there.

I couldn't even get the video to play. Nonetheless I'm sort of meta excited by this product. It reminds me of the apocryphal "customers want a faster horse" thing associated with Henry Ford. Chat bolted onto an IDE was a great starting point, but if AI is writing the code, do even need an IDE? This doesn't go that far but it sounds wacky enough that it least it's trying to break out of the IDE mold. Not idea what we need instead of an IDE but if an IDE with chat is a faster horse then I'm really curious what the car looks like. Is it just reviewing UI? Even that seems like a short term solution since I'm not sure how long code reviewing will be around as agents get better at it and it might make more sense to do fractional launches and gather data than spend precious human time looking for a bug/needle in a diff / haystack...

Sorry about the video bug, Github's manual on file attachments mentions video codecs being browser specific. I will be sure to use the most widely supported codec in the next update.

I definitely relate to a lot of your thinking here, I feel like it will just take a handful of years of experimenting with these new tools to settle on what really works. That was part of my rationale for making it more modular, as I continue to learn and grow with the tooling I can easily update my IDE to be super personalized.

The mushroom product video gave me a good laugh. Thank you!

Product looks awesome, please take the time to write a human-made README.

So the defaults are Codex and Claude? I use neither.

Codex and Claude are the defaults for now but it is built to use any CLI of your choice via the terminal.

Ok, I am sold on this. I give you 60 billion!

Just show me a screenshot please

Ummmmm.

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/agents/agents-window

> Agentic coding deserves more than a chat box bolted onto VS Code

So, Antigravity 2.0 then?

Cursor 3 as well.

Antigravity 2.0 looks exactly like codexia (as of 0.26, I forked it)

It would appear that the author of this posted a big pile of AI slop describing project and was heavily downvoted.

You are being a Devin downer.

Am I the only one who is getting tired of all the AI stuff in VS Code? I just want to open my ide and not be greeted by a dozen AI prompts begging to have it code something for me.

Its such a distraction. I want less of this stuff not more of it.

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium

It sounds like the sweet call of Vim is beckoning you.

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