As others have mentioned in this thread, you are absolutely allowed to write Kotlin in VSCode! There is a perfectly good VSCode extension [1] for it. You may not receive the same extensive support that IntelliJ IDEA provides, but as Kotlin developer who occasionally writes in VSCode, I find it's decently usable. Once you're familiar with the command line, you'll probably be more productive running Gradle commands than fiddling with buttons and UI widgets anyway.

[1]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=fwcd.kot...