Issue #173 (Configuring VS Code for Agentic Coding)08/13/25
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As the summer winds down in this part of the world, I'll be back with more intro tips in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, have you noticed that promotional materials for VS Code have changed in recent months? As is indicated on the VS Code home page, the world's most popular IDE is now considered an "AI code editor".
The above screenshot is from the current home page, seen when visiting the site on a Windows machine. Even the VS Code updates are now very AI-oriented, with the updates page usually displaying a bullet list of mostly AI-related improvements (e.g. see the latest updates in today's links below).
It will be interesting to see how the IDE market shapes up in the coming years. Will VS Code be overtaken by Cursor or another competitor? I think the VS Code team is doing everything possible to keep up their dominance and the new direction with AI is certainly going to help in that regard.
Now on to this week's hand-picked links!
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VS Code Tools
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MCP Bridge — A tool that turns AI agents into a real developer team that codes in your IDEs across multiple instances of VS Code, Cursor, and other apps, with all AI agents connected to the same shared collaboration server.
Be-a11y — A VS Code extension for running accessibility audits, enabling you to analyze your project or a remote website for accessibility issues, with results presented in a convenient way and can be saved for further review.
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
YOYO — An extension for VS Code, Cursors, Windsurf, and more, that allows you to enable AI version control so you can undo mistakes, save progress, and restore with one click.
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VS Code Theme of the Week
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Summer Time — A modern, dark Material theme that features a summer-themed color palette, which might be appropriate for this time of year in many parts of the world.
Overall it has good contrast and a nice selection of colors. It doesn't do much to the overall UI, keeping things dark and neutral, so you might like how it stays focused on the colorful editing experience.
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VS Code Articles & Videos
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VS Code 1.103 (July 2025 Updates) — The latest updates to VS code include improvements to the MCP tool picker, chat checkpoints, Git worktree support, and more.
How I Configure VS Code for Agentic Coding — Specifically covering the agentic coding tool Amp, which I've featured in this newsletter before. The author describes how he uses the editor extension for larger, more complex features and tasks.
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
VS Code Previews Chat Checkpoints for Unpicking Careless Talk — About the new Chat Checkpoints feature in VS Code that allows you to roll back a chat if you realize recent interactions have been unhelpful or even reckless.
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Best of the Rest
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DevEx — A cloud-based development IDE that enables you to create, code, and deploy with isolated containers, dynamic scaling, and seamless deployment, all in your browser.
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
📺 Writing a Text Editor — From the popular Computerphile YouTube channel, Dr. Steve Bagley, based at the University of Nottingham, looks at how such apps are created.
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
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