I'm opening VSCode less and less every day | Hacker News Reader

I'm opening VSCode less and less every day

21 pointsothmanosx23 comments

I've been a dev for close to 9 years now, always spending my time inside VSCode.

When the AI extension came in, I started writing less code, reading more.

When Claude Desktop app came in, I did not like it, stuck with the VSCode extension.

Then the app got better, and the extension got worse. so I switched my focus to that instead of the code editor.

I now view the diffs in the Claude app instead of VSCode, and only switch to VSCode for a more thorough review.

Now VSCode ships with a new view, similar to that of Claude.

I rarely open VSCode now. I rarely write code now.

I miss writing code.

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If you look back in your career, you will find out that most of time you dont write code, you read code. You need to travel back and forth of the logic to understand it, write some piece of code, run it then read it again to understand why a wierd logic happen.

You only feel powerful when you boostrap a project because you wirte a lots of skeleton code or init core logic.

Nowaday we dont have chance to even write those kind of code I miss writing code too.

yep... we are living in a time that the role of the developer is changing quickly. Boris (Cherny) wrote about it and the TL;DR:

1. Prototyper: comes up with brand new ideas; churns out many ideas, most of which don't ship 2. Builder: quickly turns a prototype/idea into production-grade product/infra 3. Sweeper: cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system, unships, optimizes performance 4. Grower: takes a product that has been built and iterates on it to improve Product-Market Fit 5. Maintainer: owns a mature system to make it secure, reliable, fast, and efficient as it scales

Genuine question - do you feel that you understand a code change well enough by only viewing diffs, enough to push the Claude code as “your own”? I can see this for some types of PRs but for anything that is relatively complex or touches multiple files, I personally have to open an editor and navigate through the code paths to really grok if an AI’s (or a human’s for that matter) change is correct.

Is this something people widely vary on? I suspect a lot of people are not like me given that I do see people saying things such as “I rarely use my ide/editor any more” with AI, hence my question to you. Maybe I’m just bad at keeping the code base all in my head.

I do agree with you that I feel that I am coding less myself and I do miss that for sure. But the job demands otherwise.

I would really like to know how people work on anything more complicated than a single page website without using an IDE/Editor any more - in my experience, AI is just not up to the task of managing multi-file projects without me having a very sharp eye on what it does.

Yeah, I use VSCode a lot less now, even for code reviews, I built my own code reviewer that's better than Github IMO. I no longer use VSCode or Github, I use Claude to produce the code and use https://pyor.review to review the code, same thing when I review my teammates' PRs.

Who are you people not writing code?

There isn’t a single SOTA model on the market that writes code as nicely as I write it.

I can only suspect these people saying they write no code have zero taste, because that’s the only way I can understand accepting the unsophisticated garbage these models produce.

Interesting take and I don't want to dismiss your experience but it's not mine.

15+ years writing code and refining it, learning. Is AI code as good? Definitely not. Is it 80-90% or the way there with correct linting, agent setup and rules? Absolutely.

It's quality vs speed vs cost adage

I still believe that I can write better code compared to what the AI can produce. But is it really... cost-effective? Probably not.

> I miss writing code

This hits hard. I used to feel a joy and sense of pride in finishing a day.

I am trying to find joys in other ways, like shipping quickly while keeping quality but engineering really has changed in a short space of time.

++1, I miss writing code.... around 60-65% of my code is written by Antigravity now. On VS Code, I had similar thoughts earlier, but after Antigravity 2.0, they have separated IDE with Agent Manger. So from now on, I am back to VS Code as my primary IDE.

One thing I would note is, I build AI Agents as my job these days, if an agent process is complex, its impossible to write even 90% working code via LLM's.

AI allows developers to write less code, but it shouldn't make us understand less. If you miss writing code, it just means you still truly care about the craft itself.

> it shouldn't make us understand less

The understanding derived from actually writing the code and making it work is much different and deeper than looking at code written for you, looking at it, and thinking, "yeah, that seems like it makes sense".

Even if I spend a significant amount of time reviewing the code to try and understand every line that was used, I don't necessarily understand why it was chosen, what were the alternatives, what would the trade offs of those alternatives be, what seems like it should work but actually wouldn't, how something might break if a little part is missing... These are all things that are better understood when actually writing the code.

Normally I would still open VS code and use Claude by using terminal.

I care less about the actual code, and more about algorithms, data structures and architectures. I'm glad that AI allow us to think less of syntax and more of logic. My suggestion is that you can use Claude through the terminal and proof read and approve the code, and if time allows it, you can write some of the code you want yourself.

Don't you need to look at the code you want to change in order to direct the AI in what you want to do, or are you simply telling it to make a feature and then looking at the changes it makes?

That's how I code nowadays:

1. Start a session.

2. Grill my requirements (I use Matt Pocock's skills).

3. Write an ADR, then either start implementing or separate into pieces.

4. Review the code on pyor.review, compared to Github, Pyor allows me to categorize the files and changes then review the important stuff and skim the noise it identifies.

5. Since I can do local reviews with Pyor, I can do that with Claude and feed back my comments to be addressed without it going to Github first.

6. Create a PR then merge it.

This brought an interesting philosophical question: do you enjoy coding itself? Or something else? If you enjoy coding itself IDE or AI agent doesn’t really matter.

Good question, If you enjoyed coding itself, you'll have a hard time now, but if you enjoy building stuff, you'll thrive in this era.

I am very close to uninstalling vscode/cursor and just using some very lightweight editor for the rare times that I need to manually edit files (mostly .env files, etc... not code)

Weird times

Yes, I no longer derive joy or a sense of accomplishment from coding. I used to enjoy making junk, but now anyone can make those things.

Ask HN isnt really the place for hosting blog posts. Instead why not put this on an external site, expand on it a bit, and submit a link?

i think this is fine as long as you actually understand what calude code is doing. Because then you are not just using claude code you are using it to automate things that you already know and are just time consuming for you when they dont need to be.

I still open Neovim, or yazi at the very least, just as much as before, gotta see what OpenCOde has been up to or it will slop the whole NixOS configuration to hell while you are looking away. And that is for my personal declarative OS set up being homeless and been on an unlucky since right before COVID but had the ability to learn all this niche crap and now LLMs make it possible to keep learning in ever less stable conditions. You are being reckless as all hell with the code you with take the `git blamne` for and could hurt more than just yourself if you are being as careless as this suggests...

之前一直都是在研究高并发，多线程等技术，现在也很少看了

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