VS Code and Agentic Development with Kai Maetzel

Visual Studio Code has become one of the most influential tools in modern software development. The open source code editor has evolved into a platform used by millions of developers around the world, and it has reshaped expectations for what a modern development environment can be through its intuitive UX, rich extension marketplace, and deep integration with today's tooling landscape. Now, in an era defined by rapid advances in AI assisted programming, Versus Code is at the center of a profound shift in how software is written. Kai Metzel is the engineering manager leading the Versus Code team at Microsoft. He joins the show with Kevin Ball to talk about the origins of Versus Code, how AI has reshaped the editor's design philosophy, the rise of agentic programming models, and what the future of development might look like. Kevin Ball, or Kay Ball, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He cofounded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI in action discussion group through Latent Space. Check out the show notes to follow Kay Ball on Twitter or LinkedIn, or visit his website, kball.llc. Kai, welcome to the show. Hi, Kevin. Thanks for having me. Yeah. I am excited for this conversation. So let's maybe start a little bit with you and your background and your journey to leading this Versus Code team. Oh, so, actually, it started very, very early on. So my first internship was already with DevTools, and I never really left DevTools. So and then, you know, now ten years ago, I joined Microsoft explicitly for the Versus Code effort. So there was, you know, there was promise that there is something that that could get traction in the market. So and that's the moment I joined, and so we pretty much went from no users to to a whole lot of those. 44,000,000 by now. Yeah. I remember when Versus Code first emerged, and I was like, another IDE, and then it kind of took over the market. Yeah. That that's true. I mean, when you think about this, right, a very well established market. Right? There are editors forever. Right? IDEs forever. But all of us somehow lived in this in between world where it's like, we're not super happy yet. Now I was like, yeah. I can do this there super, super fast, and I can do this there in a good way, but I have to wait until it starts up and it has too much stuff in my face and so on. Right? It was really finding the sweet spot in in the middle. And that's actually also how we talked about this. Right? It's really two ends of the spectrum, editor on the left hand, full fledged IDs on the right hand side versus the versus spot in between. Right? And that's really what we we tried to find, and …