I can’t believe VS Code still doesn’t have this incredible AI feature in GitHub Copilot.
It’s so clear that they’re just not the most innovative IDE in town anymore.
The powerful Tab-to-jump has already become a standard in major rivals like Windsurf and Cursor — yet VS Code is still largely stuck in line completions.
Windsurf and Cursor have had bonafide coding agents for weeks now with several updates — yet GitHub’s agent hasn’t even gone past public preview lol.
Line completions are just so old school now… why are they moving so slow?
With tab-to-jump the IDE no longer thinks merely at the level of the current line but the entire file and codebase.
It’s no longer just trying to predict our next character, but now our next action in the code.
It’s becoming more and more of a full-fledged autonomous AI companion.
Things like refactoring just keep getting easier — like recently one time I added an extra param to a method, and I instantly start Tab-to-jump suggestions which took me to all the method calls to add the new argument using the most logical variable.
It automatically analyzed the entire code base to understand that this is what I’m most likely to do.
And after I jumped, it immediately suggested regular inline completions for me to accept.
Things like this just move much faster now, I’m really feeling it.
If you’re still pretending like these AI tools are not going to drastically speed up your dev process, you’re just deceiving yourself.
Mhmm and I wonder the prompt they could have given to the model to make this tab-to-jump stuff work.
I know for inline code completions it’s pretty straightforward — something like this.
But for integrating something like tab-to-jump it’ll definitely be more complex.
The model would probably have to output two different modes of result — like “completion” mode and “jump” mode.
So maybe something like this 👇
Here I added a new param to the sum function, so the next logical thing is to update the body to include it in result.
And here I get a jump result to the 2nd line and 13th column to make the edit just after the b:
On second thought I might not even need separate modes — I could just use completion but always give a line and column, even if it’s where the cursor is:
In any case it’s a highly handy feature that every IDE needs to implement right now to be taken seriously in life.
The bar for the AI features expected of IDE will only continue to rise. Back then code completions were novel and amazing — now you must be joking if you don’t have even that.
VS Code and GitHub Copilot need to buckle up and stop letting GitHub forks put them to shame.