Issue #213 (What is a Coding Harness?)05/20/26
The Work That Got You Here is Holding You Back
What built your business won’t scale it. The habits, responsibilities, and daily involvement that once drove growth can quickly become the very things that slow it down.
The real shift is letting go of the work you’ve outgrown. The free resource From Operator to Owner: How to Exit the Middle helps leaders identify what to delegate, what to retain, and how to move forward with clarity.
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BELAY supports that transition by matching you with U.S.-based Executive Assistants who bring the judgment and reliability needed to take work off your plate, without adding full-time overhead.
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VS Code Tools
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AgentKanban — A separate app that also includes a VS Code extension, this is a task board with GitHub Copilot integration to create and plan tasks with real-time collaboration, then resume in GitHub Copilot.
EnvGuard — A smart .env manager for VS Code, enabling you to switch environments instantly, validate .env keys, scan for secrets, and do .env file diffing, all inside VS Code.
Do You Know VS Code's Native Features? — A 346-page e-book in EPUB and PDF formats that includes 150+ native tips and 450+ screenshots, to help you customize and learn Visual Studio Code, the world's most popular code editor. Sponsor
Code Telescope — A Telescope-inspired fuzzy finder for VS Code, bringing the power and flexibility of Neovim's Telescope to VS Code.
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VS Code Theme of the Week
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Vesper Purple Ox — A pleasing dark theme, with a light alternative, that features "vibrant accents, semantic highlighting, and full UI coverage."
As the name suggests, purples are strong in this one, with a nice black background and clear UI choices. The light theme is nothing special, but you might wan to try it if you prefer that with the purple theme (though the purples aren't as prominent on the lighter background).
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VS Code Articles & Videos
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The Coding Harness Behind GitHub Copilot in VS Code — The phrase 'coding harness' is being thrown around the industry lately, so this blog post from the VS Code team might clear up a few things on its meaning and significance.
How Much Time Developers Actually Code, Debug, and Meet — Based on 2026 data from 100k developers, the authors used "IDE heartbeat data" to confirm a median of 78 minutes per day of coding. There's also data on IDE usage, with VS Code still in the lead.
TLDR Design — Curated design tools, trends, and inspiration in 5 minutes a day, for design professionals. Join 225,000 readers. Sponsor
Agents Can Now Verify Your UI Changes Without Leaving VS Code — A look at a new feature released in VS Code 1.110, allowing agents to open, interact with, and inspect your running application directly inside VS Code's integrated browser.
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Best of the Rest
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Hopper — An agentic development environment for the mainframe that enables you to use AI agents to navigate TN3270, inspect datasets, write JCL, debug jobs, query VSAM, and operate inside z/OS from a modern development environment.
Zed is 1.0 — "Instead of building Zed like a web page, we built it like a video game, organizing the entire application around feeding data to shaders running on the GPU."
Web Tools Weekly — Check out my largest newsletter, the only one in the industry focused solely on sharing the latest and greatest in tools for CSS, JavaScript, React, AI, SVG, Vue, Node.js, and lots more. Sponsor
Nimbalyst — An open source visual workspace for building with Codex, Claude Code, and more. Manage your agents, sessions, tasks, and files, visually edit markdown, mockups, diagrams, diffs, and code.
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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