I don't really use VS Code as an editor
This is on the list, and I want to be accurate about why. I didn't compare editors and choose this one. I started building things with AI assistance in 2025, and VS Code is where that happens.
If you took the AI tooling away tomorrow, I'd do my text editing in BBEdit and barely notice.
The two things that put it here
Dev containers that start themselves. Each project carries its own environment, and opening the project brings that environment up — the right runtime, the right dependencies, isolated from everything else on the machine. For someone who isn't a developer by trade, this removed an entire category of problem I used to lose evenings to. I no longer have any idea what's installed globally on this Mac, and I no longer need to.
Claude in two forms at once. The plugin gives me the graphical version; the built-in terminal gives me the command-line one. Different jobs suit each — planning and reviewing in the GUI, longer autonomous work in the terminal — and having both a keystroke apart means I pick per task rather than per tool.
What I build with it
For myself: I keep a few websites running, and occasionally build a small single-purpose tool when I want something that doesn't exist.
For work: two larger things. One safely records, transcribes and summarises meetings. The other takes the transcripts and documents from a project and builds an ontology of the topics and themes in them, so you can ask questions of the whole corpus — what positions a particular stakeholder has taken across months of meetings, or what's actually been said about a vendor.
I mention these because "I'm not a developer" and "I build software" sound contradictory, and increasingly they aren't. I'm not writing that code line by line. I'm deciding what it should do, reading what comes back, and being responsible for it.
The verdict
Free and open source, so there's nothing to weigh up on price. If you're writing code with AI help, this is where the tooling is. If you just want to edit text, it's far more than you need — get BBEdit instead.
Part of the Mac software I actually use — nineteen tools, one write-up a week. Put together with AI, based entirely on my own use and opinions.
