I'm opening VSCode less and less every day
A developer with nearly nine years of experience describes a gradual shift away from using VSCode as AI tools like Claude Desktop have taken over more of their workflow. They now spend more time reviewing diffs in the Claude app than writing code in VSCode, and express nostalgia for the days when they wrote more code themselves.
Background
- The post is from Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com), a tech-community discussion site owned by Y Combinator where developers share experiences.
- VSCode (Visual Studio Code) is Microsoft's free, widely used source-code editor — the dominant tool for professional software development.
- "AI extension" refers to code-completion tools like GitHub Copilot (also Microsoft) that autocomplete or suggest code as you type.
- "Claude Desktop app" is Anthropic's standalone desktop client for Claude, their AI assistant. It can generate, review, and diff code independently of a traditional editor.
- The author describes a workflow shift: instead of writing code in an editor with AI help, they now let Claude generate code in its own app and only use the editor to review changes (diffs). This reflects a broader industry debate about whether AI is turning developers from writers of code into reviewers/approvers of AI output.