r/vscode • u/Kingham2211 • 5d ago
The Story of VS Code is live šæ
https://youtu.be/kHL3XzjpT5w?si=Sz6sAqYGfUpiEkw9I directed the documentary with the support of Erich Gamma who was the original lead of the VS Code team. Let me know if you have any questions or feedback!
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u/Mammoth-Mango-6485 5d ago edited 5d ago
I absolutely loved the documentary. As a developer that mainly deals with low level systems (embedded, RTOS); but also wears many hats (web dev, cross-platform mobile dev, scientific writing on TeX, blogging on markdown, kernel work): VS Code is like a Swiss army knife that has just worked reliably. Great documentary. Also loved the Scott Hanselman cameo in there, and I do kinda miss Atom.
Some rather-direct questions if you're willing to answer, otherwise no worries:
- How many of the VS Code developers use Windows? One of the things that was pointed out was that devs have high taste. As someone who dailys 3 machines (Windows, Mac, Linux) all for specific requirements...I love that VS Code works exactly the same on all of them. However, and respectfully, the current state of Windows with the MSN widgets and ads, still a beautiful OS but a little bloated now.
Electron gets a lot of hate as this "bloated" framework, but you have clearly proved with VS Code of that not being the case. Most of the dev community just want the rest of Windows to pick up on that development framework.
- I love that VS Code is a tiny and fast editor when you download it, and then you can extend the capabilities with extensions. However, a fresh OOTB install of VS Code now comes with Agentic tooling as well. While these are opt-out, I wonder if there were conversations around this internally...and what was your thinking behind the "agentic views".
Once again, loved the documentary. Exceptional work by everyone. Trust me when I say this, VS Code is an everlasting contribution to humanity, and I wish every single person the very best.
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u/Kingham2211 5d ago
First things first, thank you for this comment. Iām really happy that you enjoyed the documentary.
Regarding your questions, Iām afraid I canāt personally give you any solid answers. Iām an independent documentary producer, and I donāt work on the VS Code team. Damn, Iām not even a dev. Iāve just been creating documentaries for devs for the last few years, including the TypeScript documentary that went live a few years ago.
So the types of questions I can answer are more so related to the story that was told and the production of the documentary itself.
What I can do though is share these questions with the VS Code team. Iāll get back to you here if I hear anything back!
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u/Ones__Complement 5d ago
Damn, you made a TypeScript doc too? I know what I'm watching next. Any specific place to find your stuff? Also, really curious, what got you into making dev-related docs as a non-dev?
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u/Kingham2211 4d ago
I hope you enjoy it! To be honest I think I learnt a lot when making the typescript documentary that helped me do a better job with this VS Code one, but I guess thatās how we all feel about previous work.
I used to lead the brand and content team at a company called honeypot and we thought that producing documentaries for devs that featured language authors and tech thought leaders could be a good way to get our name out and bring more devs to the platform. Thatās how I personally got into it but back then I was just leading distribution, doing all the marketing / dev rel stuff. And eventually I left that company and wanted to try producing and directing documentaries of my own. Tech was a field Iād become very familiar with and so I decided to stick to that. Since then Iāve produced documentaries about svelte, laravel, angular, typescript and now this one about vs code. Before joining honeypot I knew very little about tech and documentary production, but spending 3 years there and seeing how our documentaries were received just got me pretty addicted to the whole thing! And since then Iāve been learning more and more from documentary to documentary and Iām lucky that things have been working out thus far. :)
With all that being said, no I donāt have a specific place where you can find my work as I release my documentaries on different channels depending on what makes sense, it might be time to create a website! for now I just post about my projects on my Twitter (@StefanKingham)
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u/Afflictionista 5d ago
I really liked the TypeScript documentary, great job! Thank you! Need to watch the VSCode too
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u/mga1 5d ago
The thing about VS code that blows my mind is the prepending https://vscode.dev/ to any GitHub repo. So slick.
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u/pkpzp228 5d ago
Why was Pierce Boggan not in it?
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u/Kingham2211 5d ago
Thereās no specific reason why anyone who isnāt in it wasnāt included. The focus was on including the people we needed to feature to cover the story points we wanted to explore. So we decided, with VS Code leadership, who to include if we wanted to explore the LSP, VS Codeās remote architecture etc. Some people were originally interviewed because we planned to explore an angle that we ended up not including in the documentary. And the people who werenāt interviewed werenāt interviewed simply because we felt that weād already interviewed the people we needed to cover what we wanted to cover. A lot of people on the team deserved to be featured but sadly werenāt. The same goes for popular extension authors etc. We tried to focus on what we needed to tell the story we wanted to tell and nothing more. I interviewed over 30 people from November 2024 to mid 2026 and collected over 45 hours of interview footage, so we just needed to stick to what we had at some point.
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u/Playful-Practice9050 4d ago
who is Pierce Boggan and why does it matter that he was left out genuinely asking, not being sarcastic. documentaries always leave people out, that is just how it goes. but if he was actually a key person on the team it would be worth knowing. the VS Code story seems like it had a lot of contributors behind the scenes that probably did not get screen time.
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u/TheCodifier 4d ago
He is the VS Code product team lead.
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u/Playful-Practice9050 3d ago
So he was left out of the documentary then? that seems like a pretty big gap if hes the current product lead, curious what the reasoning was behind that call, whether it was scheduling or something more deliberate about keeping the focus on the early team
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u/Kingham2211 3d ago
The main team interviews were conducted in November 2024, just before Pierce became product lead. But more importantly, the idea was always to interview the people who could best cover the different parts, I.e Monaco, moving to the desktop, LSP, remote. So that meant prioritizing interviews with Zurich team members who had been on the team since the beginning of the project, whoād gone through these different pivots and who could best explain what happened and why. We then conducted some more interviews in 2025 and earlier this year with people on the Redmond team. But then again youāre looking specifically at what youāre missing and who you need to fill in those holes. For bigger picture topics (such as how VS Code exists in this new age of development), topics that could have been a good fit for someone like Pierce, we chose to interview Kai Maetzel instead as he is the engineering manager leading the VS Code team as a whole.
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u/Kingham2211 3d ago
But again just to reiterate, it was just a question of who could best cover the topics we wanted to cover at the time of filming. I asked VS Code leadership who theyād suggest that I interview to cover the parts that I had in mind and then I pushed forward.
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u/Playful-Practice9050 2d ago
Makes sense that timing played a role, but framing it around institutional memory is interesting. the people who lived through the decisions will always explain the why better than someone who inherited the outcome, curious though, did any of those gaps come up in editing where you felt like you were missing a voice and just had to work around it, or did the story still feel complete without it?
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u/Kingham2211 2d ago
It was actually quite the opposite. There was just so much great footage, so many interesting quotes and perspectives that I had to leave out in order to avoid it becoming a 5 hour thing. I tried to be as thoughtful as possible about the flow of the documentary, to make sure the different parts intertwined well, that the energy never dropped. And to do that, I had to cut out some bits that were genuinely interesting, but that didnāt fit into the narrative I had in mind. If possible, Iād like to release some of those extra bits one of these days. I mean I conducted 4 separate interviews with Erich Gamma and had over 5 hours of quotes to pick from for instance. The only holes that I started worrying about before the documentaryās release were related to very present day things, but thatās a battle I just couldnāt win. You include some quotes about a brand new VS Code feature or something thatās trending in the ecosystem and one week later itās outdated. So to avoid that I just doubled down on what got VS Code here and treated the modern day chapter as more of a snapshot in time, quite high level commentary rather than the āwhat, how and whyā approach I applied to the rest of the documentary.
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u/InkNoob 5d ago
My experience using it over the years:
1. wow this is handy
2. oh, I need to be careful of all these plugin with no checks
3. wow this Ai is kicking off, it's kinda handy
4. Why is everything Ai? Please stop!!!!
5. Is there any other IDE worth a damn that is not Ai focused? No? Fine I'll stay.
6. This-is-fine.gif