Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · August 2026
On a Syntax episode about AI coding habits, Tolinski pushes back on the idea that AI assistance fixes maintainability by itself. The line lands while he's arguing that letting a model add code additively instead of fixing it properly doesn't change the underlying problem.
Yeah, right. Yeah. Totally.
Next question from guitars and dev. I still code most of my time in VS Code and I have the plain GitHub Copilot license. I use and love the terminal a lot, especially for Git. Now that coding agents and CLIs are the main thing, I feel a bit awkward in my setup compared to the cloud code, codecs, open code users. I must say with the V2 incoming and the new TypeScript rewrite and all of the good things VS Code has done around agents, I feel that I have everything that compares to other editors. And what bothers me is that with AI usage and configs, it depends on the editor and there is no real standard. Yes, there is some work to standardize these things, but fortunately not everybody agrees. VS Code is very hard to step away from because I've used it now for more than five years. I've had this with Sublime Text and I've had a crazy amount of shortcuts and snippets. Is it time to step away from VS Code or not just yet? With all the GitHub code being leaked, I can imagine that VS Code also got leaked. What are your takes on this? It's got a couple questions there. Is like, is it time to step away from the IDE itself? Certainly a lot of people think so. And certainly a lot of like cursor is trying to push people out of the IDE into this like this platform that everybody is building, right? Like the either it's going to be a TUI or it's going to be, I think they ideally they want you in some sort of desktop application that will do all of your code and all of your chats and integrate with all of your work. Like cowork is the new, the new coding that they're trying to push everybody onto. So I, I don't know, I have a hard time. I still feel most comfortable doing most of my work in an editor, or if I'm doing it from a TUI, then I still have the editor open as well. So I'd be able to jump back and forth simply just because it's A, it's easier to understand what's coming in. Not that I necessarily will read everything that's coming in, but it's faster. And B, like it's way easier just to like change stuff and like be able to make design something to make it look like you want because it's very frustrating when the CSS comes in and it doesn't look very good. Like, what are you going to do? You're just going to make it look a little bit better. You know, it's so much easier for me just to jump in and actually write a little bit of code there. So is it time to step away? I don't, I don't think so. I think like, like you said, VS Code, they have all of the features. They're pushing in the direction of all of the other things that Codex, Cloud Code, Open Code already have. Certainly they have an advantage of being integrated. They're a little bit behind and they got their lunch eight on quite a bit of this stuff. But I wouldn't say that if I'd say like, if you're comfortable with this type of stuff, I don't think there's much that you're missing from it from moving to another harness. What do you think?
Yeah, no, I 100% agree. And I do love VS Code. Absolutely. I think it's, I think a lot, I'm not going to say the performance is perfect on it, but a lot of times people complain about the performance are the same people who just installed whatever extension that someone on YouTube told them to install. And some of those extensions are not good. Like people still install that Wix extension, which is like import cost, which is like a runaway process or something like that. So, you know, a lot of times what you're better off doing is paring down your VS Code setup instead of just ditching it entirely. I do tend to use Zed primarily as my text editor of choice these days. And I, like you, also agree, I like to have it open and I like to have it open with the projects that I'm working on in AI for simple, quick fixes. And oftentimes I still like, I still really hate the output, like you said, CSS specifically. I really hate the CSS output. And many times it's easier for me to just go in and fix it quickly rather than have the AI try again and try again and not necessarily understand what I'm trying to get at in terms of like the way that I Wanted. And people, you know, when they say, why does it matter? Well, you know, an unmaintainable code base is still an unmaintainable code base with AI. AI can just like additively continue to add things infinitely and patch issues rather than rather than fix them in a correct way or something like that. And yeah, I mean, you could definitely argue that it doesn't matter. You just prompt and prompt and prompt. But again, all that stuff costs money, costs tokens. Yeah. I'm smart. I can fix it.
I think with a lot of this stuff, people feel like, am I falling behind because I'm not switching up my tool stack? And if you feel like that, I think it's worth switching to something else for a couple weeks just to understand how other people are working. And you might come out of that on the other end and say, I don't necessarily like these bits, but you'll probably also come out of it being like, oh, I understand why people are doing things a little bit differently. I understand why they're approaching it in this way. So with whenever these things change so quickly like this, it's always kind of scary. Like, am I wrong? Am I old? Am I like stubborn in what I'm doing? Yes. Or are they just, are these people just chasing after what is exciting? And generally, it's a little bit of both. And generally, there are some good workflows that can be pulled out of that. So I would probably at least pick a side project and say, I'm going to try to do this entirely in new tools. And you'll probably come out of that learning a few things. And then you can, you feel confident in making your decision of how you'd like to go forward.
Yes, yes, totally. So, yeah, I mean, again, I still like using VS Code. I still like using Zed. And a big fan of Ben Vinegar and his hunk package, which shows you diffs, but I can't personally ride with just a diff in a term. You know, I need like having a diff that you can edit via Zed is something that I prefer to work in. There are times when I do just want to track the diff to see exactly what's going on and keep an eye on things. But if I want to have a hand in it, which sometimes I do, depends on the software that I'm building, I will have a VS Code open as or I don't know. I think the biggest
problem that cursor and VS Code have is that the freaking sidebar is too small for people. And a lot of people just have a tiny little sidebar and they're used to that. And then a majority of your work has now moved into this sidebar. And the ergonomics of that is really frustrating. It's hard to get uptake. So what a lot of they're doing is they're trying to push you into more of this like, you got your chat in the middle, you got your project on the left, and you got your like your diffs on the right. You know, like that's, that's the app that everybody is building right now. And that's a little bit of more of an ergonomic view for that. And that's not to say that you can't get that set up with VS Code. It's just that I think a lot of people don't get that set up. And then it's hard to push them into this new set of features when you're working in this tiny little sidebar.