The desperation is all over the place now.
Before:
After:
VS Code is no longer about having an open-source lightweight editor freely available to anyone.
Now it’s about winning the AI race with GitHub Copilot.
At first they were playing it cool — Copilot was just another extension you installed like Tabnine and others.
But soon VS Code slowly started being used more and more as a marketing platform to get people to pay for Copilot.
Copilot promo in the Welcome Page — a great, hard-to-miss location right?
And if you miss that, you most certainly wouldn’t miss the Copilot button right next to the search bar.
Visible not just on the Welcome page but on any page — or no page open at all.
I knew it once I saw this button appear. Yet another app had hopped on the AI train.
Copilot was no longer being treated as just another VS Code extension, but a core part of the editor.
The face of VS Code.
When you think of VS Code, you are to immediately think of Copilot.
Well shouldn’t we have seen this coming.
No matter how much they tuned down the branding and positioned it as a free and happy open-source tool, at the end of the day it was always a corporate-owned product.
They always had the power to change the direction it would take in the future.
And with all the serious competition from Cursor and Windsurf it was only a matter of time.
Especially with these alternatives being forks of VS Code — incredibly easy to switch and still feel at home.
It was the same competition that forced them to create a free tier for Copilot.
Every single IDE is going the AI way and they have to keep up.
They’re not the only ones feeling the heat too.
JetBrains is about to make AI take the center-stage in all their IDEs with a new agentic tool called Junie.
After the disastrous performance of their AI Assistant they also realized they needed to step up their AI game.
So very soon WebStorm and Pycharm and IntelliJ are going to be all about AI.
We can complain about this as much as we want but this is the direction everyone is taking now.
Many other apps like Notion and Adobe tools have also made people angry about their heavy focus on AI at the cost of other features and fixes.
But the AI wave will continue to spread.
AI in your sleep, AI when you wake up, AI for breakfast lunch and dinner. AI before bed.
AI all day everyday.