2 posts tagged with "ai-coding"

The default mental model for an AI coding tool is a panel inside VS Code. A chat box, a few inline suggestions, maybe an "apply diff" button. That framing is two years out of date. The leading products in the category are not VS Code extensions; they are full editors that happen to look like VS Code on launch. Cursor is a fork. Windsurf is a fork. Zed is a from-scratch native editor. The pattern is not coincidence — it is what happens when an agent's surface area finally exceeds what the host editor's plugin API was designed to support.

If you are building a coding agent and still treating "ship a plugin" as the obvious distribution choice, you are about to hit the same wall the leaders walked into around 2024 and chose to climb. The wall has a name: the plugin API was built to add features to an editor controlled by humans, not to host an autonomous agent that wants to control the editor.

Andrej Karpathy coined "vibe coding" in early 2025 to describe a style of programming where you "fully give into the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists." You describe what you want in natural language, the AI generates it, and you ship. It felt like a superpower. Within a year, the data started telling a different story.

A METR randomized controlled trial found that experienced open-source developers were 19% slower when using AI coding tools — despite predicting they'd be 24% faster, and still believing afterward they'd been 20% faster. A CodeRabbit analysis of 470 GitHub pull requests found AI co-authored code contained 1.7x more major issues than human-written code. And an Anthropic study of 52 engineers showed AI-assisted developers scored 17% lower on comprehension tests of their own codebases.