Issue #172  (Custom Chat Mode in VS Code)08/06/25

This week's theme of the week is a novelty theme that you may want to check out just for fun (see below). When I installed the theme to test it, I got the following popup message:
 
I don't see too many of these when installing extensions, but it does happen. If you find these types of notifications annoying, you can enable the Extensions: Ignore Recommendations setting:
 
It's off by default and I'm assuming this would have prevented that little popup from showing up. And as a side note, in the "Articles..." section below, I link to a Hacker News thread about such a popup that one user considered to be an 'ad'. So if you don't like these notifications, this seems to be a way to disable them.

Now on to this week's hand-picked links!
 

VS Code Tools

Pythagora — A VS Code extension that provides an all-in-one AI development platform to easily plan, build, debug, and deploy your apps.

Git VS Code Stats — A lightweight VS Code extension and CLI tool that analyzes your Git commits, tracks coding statistics, and helps you understand your productivity patterns.

Refind — Brain food, delivered daily. Every day the team at Refind analyzes thousands of articles and sends you only the best, tailored to your interests. Loved by 540,000+ curious minds.   Sponsor 

Neon Local Connect — A VS Code extension that provides a local development environment for the Neon Databases with branch management (see articles below for an intro post).

VS Code Articles & Videos

📺 Custom Chat Mode Will Change How You Code — From the VS Code YouTube channel, a look at how to customize chat in VS Code by creating your own Custom Chat Mode using tools like codebase, search, fetch, etc.

I Just Got an Ad in VS Code — A Hacker News thread started by a user who suggests that VS Code's popup to sign in and use Copilot is considered an advertisement of sorts.

The Morning Paper for Tech — Want a byte-sized version of Hacker News that takes just a few minutes to read? Try TLDR's free daily newsletter. It covers the most interesting tech, startup, and programming stories in just 5 minutes. No sports and no politics.   Sponsor 

Neon Now Runs in VS Code — Official launch post for Neon Local Connect (linked above), a new VS Code extension that connects your Neon database to your local dev environment using a static localhost connection string.

Best of the Rest

LangFast — An LLM playground to test, compare, and version prompts instantly in a shared workspace, with structured output, side-by-side editing, support for Vision (image uploading), and more.

Edit — An editor that pays homage to the classic MS-DOS Editor, but with a modern interface and input controls similar to VS Code, to provide an accessible editor that even users largely unfamiliar with terminals can easily use.

Tech Productivity — One of my other weekly newsletters, a brief one sent every Monday that features tips, tools, apps, and articles on productivity, focus, work culture, and more, mostly in the tech industry.   Sponsor 

Junie — A coding agent for JetBrains IDEs that fits in seamlessly with your existing workflow and has support for IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, GoLand, PhpStorm, RubyMine, RustRover, and Android Studio.

Suggestions?

If you have any link suggestions, including a tool, article, or other resource related to VS Code or another IDE, you can hit reply, send it via DM on X, or via chat on Bluesky.

That's it for this issue.

Happy VS Coding!
Louis
VSCode.Email
@LouisLazaris