One of the surprisingly sticky parts of IT infrastructure over recent decades is, weirdly enough, the code editor or IDE. Sure, backend databases and transaction systems may have a long shelf life, but developers are like baby ducks with their mothers – once they imprint on an editor they’re Emacs or Vim for life. But suddenly we’re in a position where there is a surprising amount of turbulence in the market for editors. Launched in April 2015, by the early 2020s Visual Studio Code had already become a de facto industry standard. The next generation had arrived.
Microsoft caught some waves perfectly with VS Code. The editor offered excellent JavaScript support just as JavaScript had become the dominant programming language. VS Code was built in TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript with support for types, which has also grown explosively. The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings show this growth clearly.
Bit of an aside here – when you think of developers that have game, that make an impact at scale, well, Microsoft not only hires these people, but it allows them to do their best work, changing the industry in the process. Erich Gamma led the VS Code project. Anders Hejlsberg was the creator of TypeScript. Gamma was also the lead developer for the Eclipse project, a previous industry standard editor. And Hejlsberg, yeah he wrote Turbo Pascal and Delphi, and now works at Microsoft as the lead architect of C# and as core developer on TypeScript (he announced the language in 2012). But anyway – let’s continue discussing the fruits of their labours – VS Code.
A new generation of web programmers was emerging, and they adopted VS Code for its combination of great language support, Intellisense and debugging capabilities. Code also had a goldilocks vibe – neither being too heavyweight nor too lightweight, but just right. Lightweight enough to be an editor and feature rich enough to bring the best capabilities of an IDE.
And so with VS Code, along with its ownership of GitHub, and deep partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft established itself clearly as the developer experience leader for the folks building the next generation of applications. Microsoft also got off the blocks quickly with AI-based code generation in the shape of GitHub Copilot, initially launched as a VS Code extension in June 2021 – Introducing GitHub Copilot: your AI pair programmer. A JetBrains plugin followed in October of the same year, with meant that Copilot was multi-editor, even if VS Code was the primary development target. Copilot quickly became GitHub’s fastest ever growing product in terms of sales.
What. Great. Positioning.
But the disruption in multiple markets driven by LLMs and AI adoption is not going to leave anyone untouched. Microsoft is no exception. The explosive disruption driven by LLM-based technology put AWS on the back foot. Google wobbled throughout 2023 and 2024 but is stabilizing now.
But even OpenAI found out that being synonymous with AI in 2023 wasn’t going to be an easy position to defend either. In terms of code generation 2024 was Anthropic’s year. Claude has been crushing it in benchmarks, and developers are really positive about the various models in the stable. In October 2024 GitHub announced that Copilot would support multiple LLMs. Claude of course was one of them. In December 2024 Microsoft announced GitHub Pilot would be free for all VS Code users. Lots of competition, plenty of disruption.
So if 2024 was the year of Claude when it comes to models, from a code editor perspective the new hotness was definitely Cursor, an AI-optimised fork of VS Code.
When my son was writing some code and wanted to accelerate his project, I naturally recommended Cursor. On day one he was still getting used to Cursor, but by day three he was raving about how it understood what he was building, and was making substantive suggestions about how to improve the structure of the app, in terms of classes, structure and flow.
I am not a huge fan of the term agent, but Cursor nailed AI-based workflows, where a service in the editor is watching the developer, asking LLMs questions on their behalf, and effectively building a model of the task at hand, which the developer can then tap into.
People are launching new AI-first editors what feels like almost every day, now, or at least it feels like it. And that Microsoft lock(in) with Code and Copilot, which we might have expected to last a decade at least doesn’t seem quite so fixed. What if developers are already ready to consider alternatives to Code? And indeed they are. When LLMs came along, pretty clearly, there was an opportunity to rethink all developer workflows, both inner loop (coding, thinking, problem solving, mostly local) and outer loop (deploying, managing apps in production, usually cloud-based services).
The disruption opportunity was obvious, because initially you had developers using their favorite editor and then changing context to ask ChatGPT a question, getting it to generate some code, discussing the code with it, coming up with something better and then pasting it into the editor. GitHub Copilot, with a more integrated experience, was already in development, but ChatGPT was the platform with far wider distribution – it got into developers’ hands really quickly.
Success in tech is always a packaging exercise.
Obviously, Cursor hit a sweet spot of usefulness, packaging a fork of VS Code, with LLM goodness. Cursor packages LLM functionality in such a way that it feels autonomous, as if it’s paying attention to the developer and their intentions. Developers want to use tools that understand the entire code base, rather than simply the file they’re working on. While not an editor, Augment Code does a great job of this. When a developer is working on a problem, and makes a change, it identifies other areas in the codebase, even if written in a different language, that also need to be changed. Auto complete really has come a long way.
Cursor can’t rest on its laurels. It crushed it in 2024, but by the end of year developers had begun to rave about a new kid on the block – Windsurf Editor by Codeium. Windsurf is really good with context, and it’s really nicely designed. Also – and this may be increasingly important given the theme of this post, as with Cursor, the team behind Windsurf decided the best way to manage the end to end experience was to fork VS Code. According to Codeium
This is why we decided to take the somewhat-memed approach of forking Visual Studio Code; this massively increased the flexibility in UX by not being constrained by the APIs for VS Code extensions, while simultaneously not having to rebuild all of the core internals of an IDE.
With that out of the way, we started questioning everything about what an editor needed to have and not have if you had this AI flow that could search, traverse, and analyze code as well as make multi-file edits and execute terminal commands.”
So while GitHub Copilot is crushing it in the market, winning thousands of enterprise customers, and a significant ARR, some of the cool kids are gravitating towards Cursor and Codium and the like. For now. Because of course it’s early days. There is so much work to do, and so much innovation happening.
My colleague Kate recently wrote up a refreshed Top 10 Things Developers Want from their AI Code Assistants in 2024 which you should definitely read for additional context.
Looking back at the announcements from GitHub Universe late last year, it’s not exactly that GitHub is on the back foot, but it certainly understands that Cursor offers a substantive challenge. The best packager wins.
So GitHub is responding now to some pathways and workflows that Cursor has laid down, and rethinking its own. There’s always room for innovation in software. But yes, there is clearly room for disruption right now. Code editors for the LLM era are far from done. VS Code with the Copilot extension has incredible momentum, and it’s got the whole Microsoft sales force behind it. VS Code is being forked, and those forks are being forked, which is an issue in terms of project and product sustainability, but, there is certainly a proportion of the software developer market that is prepared to consider alternatives.
For those less keen on forks that want to stick with VS Code or Jetbrains they have plenty of AI assistant plugin options such as Augment Code, Sourcegraph’s Cody or Continue.
But yep, everything is in play. Frontier Models, editors focusing on developer experience, domain specific code assistants. It’s an exciting time. As I wrote in January 2023, Developer Experience and AI are now inextricably linked.
disclosure: GitHub and Microsoft are clients.
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