Microsoft just released The Story of VS Code, an official documentary directed by Stefan Kingham that traces the editor's ten-year journey; from a small team in Zurich building a browser-based editor called Monaco, to the tool most of us now open dozens of times a day.
Watching it made me think back on my own relationship with VS Code, which turns out to be more of a slow conversion than a sudden switch.
Two editors, one workflow
For most of my career I've been a Visual Studio guy. Full IDE, integrated debugger, the whole .NET toolchain in one window. That didn't change overnight. What did change is that VS Code quietly became my default for anything web-related — a bit of JavaScript here, a config file there, a quick edit to a YAML pipeline. For years I ran both editors side by side, each with its own job.
Visual Studio for "real" application code, VS Code for everything lighter and faster.
The extensions ecosystem got me curious
I always liked what the extensions ecosystem made possible. Install a couple of plugins and suddenly you have linting, formatting, Docker support, whatever you need for the task in front of you. It's the same story the documentary tells about VS Code's early growth: an editor that stays small at its core and lets the community build out the rest. I liked that. It just wasn't enough on its own to pull me away from Visual Studio for day-to-day development.
The Copilot moment
What actually tipped the balance was GitHub Copilot landing inside VS Code. That's the point where VS Code stopped being "the editor I use for web stuff" and became my main editor, full stop. Not because of a single killer feature, but because the combination of a fast, extensible editor and an AI pair programmer sitting right there in the same window changed how I actually work. (And also a little bit because the Copilot integration in Visual Studio at that time was way worse).
Once that clicked, going back to switching between two editors for two kinds of work felt like friction I no longer needed.
Remark: it's a good reminder that adoption rarely happens because of the thing a product does well from day one. It happens when a new capability removes a reason you were holding onto something else.
Where that leaves me now
These days VS Code is where I spend most of my time, regardless of whether I'm touching .NET, Azure config, or a quick script. Visual Studio hasn't disappeared from my machine, but it's no longer the default. The documentary put a name to something I'd felt but never really articulated: VS Code's whole trajectory has been about meeting developers where they are instead of asking them to come to Microsoft's platform. My own switch is a pretty small, personal example of exactly that strategy working.
If you've used VS Code for any part of your career, The Story of VS Code is worth the hour and forty minutes. It's free on YouTube, and it's the kind of documentary that will probably make you think back on your own version of this story too.
Here is the YouTube link: The Story of VS Code | Official Documentary