VS Code

What it is

Visual Studio Code is a text editor for code, free and the same on every system. It is interesting here because it is where building and AI assistance now meet.

Where it holds

Everything that ends up as a file is made here: a shop’s templates, a server’s configuration, a website’s code. The advantage over editing in some web interface is not convenience but version control. What sits in a Git repository can be compared, rolled back and explained.

The real jump came with assistants that read the whole project before changing anything. A model that knows the context makes different suggestions from one shown a fragment.

Where it bites

Extensions make it slow. Install twenty and you have a sluggish editor and no idea which of them is mangling your formatting.

It does not replace understanding. An assistant writing code you do not read produces things that run until they stop, and then you are standing in front of something foreign. The point is not to type faster but to check more.

For non-developers it is the wrong door. If you run a shop, you never need to touch this.

What it looks like when it runs

Everything that makes the business run sits as text in one place: the site, the shop templates, the server configuration, the workflows. That sounds like developer business and is in fact the precondition for reading a change back, undoing it, and handing it to somebody else. Anyone who has hunted for a setting that exists only inside a click menu knows the difference.

What to think about before choosing it

If you do not build yourself, this is not a tool for you but for whoever builds for you. What you can measure them by, though: does what they built sit in a repository that belongs to you, or only in a web interface you have no access to?