This is why I have much respect for the Zed team as they are chasing originality, not just slap something onto VS Code and call it a new IDE.

I love Zed code. Sad that Sublime Text is not keeping up.

These are two of the fastest editors, and I use both, but I don't think they're for the same thing: Zed is for multi-file projects with moderate IDE abstractions (Worse than Jetbrains; better than most others); Sublime is for editing one-off files with syntax highlighting.

On the contrary, I am glad that the Sublime team did not fall for the trends and avoided adding AI slop into the editor

I would bet in time they are vindicated. Then Google et al will release something with much advertising hype about "returning to basics" or something in a couple of years.

Once the UI soup around AI dev use has settled (and it's getting closer) I bet you we will see native apps with c/c++/zig/rust backends that render so much faster on all the junctions that aren't roundtrip limited (and yes, that will still matter to many people).

Why would you bet that? It hadn't happened before AI so not sure why it would now. In fact this is why VSCode was even created, because it was easier hacking on a browser renderer than making something from scratch.

If both work equally well then why does it matter whether Zed or VSCode is under the hood?

I think the point is that they don’t both work equally well.

Then maybe they shoulda elaborated on that? /shrug

Is the extension system in VSCode not powerful enough to make these just normal extensions for a vanilla VSCode executable? Or is everyone just going for lock in, since if you download MyFork, you can't start using some other extension that uses OtherGuysModel?

Correct. One could say the same thing for browsers. I suppose on the one hand it's good that it's relatively easy to spin up a new project like this, on the other hand one must swear allegiance to their large software company of choice.

Back when Cursor was new (before literally everything was AI hype) they explicitly called out that they wanted to do more in-depth integration with the editor than was possible with just the extension APIs.

Presumably that hasn't changed much. If you want to do any large-scale edits of the UI you need to spin up a fork.

I don't know, does Cursor offer anything substantial beyond an extension like kilocode? (I've only used vanilla VSCodium branch with various extensions but they all seem to integrate everything from tab-completion to complete UI agentic take-over very well)

How many forks of VS Code am I supposed to have installed at this point?

You'll need a Chromium based app to count the installs for you.

My YC2026 startups are an AI agent that automatically manages your VSCode forks, and a public safety computer vision app for smart glasses that predicts whether someone can afford a lawyer based on their skin color

They'll have to compete with these other pending funded companies:

- ai therapist for your ai agents

- genetic ai agent container orchestration; only the best results survive so they have to fight for their virtual lives

- prompt engineering as a service

- social media post generator so you can post "what if ai fundamentally changes everything about how people interact with software" think pieces even faster

- vector db but actually json for some reason

(Edit: formatting)

Don't forget there's 2 or 3 of each in YC2026.

> genetic ai agent container orchestration; only the best results survive so they have to fight for their virtual lives

AI Agent Orchestration Battle Bots. Old school VMs are the brute tanks just slowly ramming everybody off the field. A swarm of erratically behaving lightweight K8s Pods madly slicing and dicing everything coming on their way. Winner takes control of the host capacity.

I might need this in my life.

yes

It's also an absolutely basic fork. They haven't even bothered with a custom theme, or custom UI, it's just vscode with an agents window slapped on top.

Weirdly, out of all the vscode forks the best UI is probably bytedance's TRAE

> VSCode

You mean Chromium wrapper?

Chromium? You mean OS wrapper?

OS? You mean HAL wrapper?

HAL? You mean hardware wrapper?