With all this AI fuss, I took time to consider what are the new dependencies (tools, SaaS) my company rely on heavily.

Of course, we can’t ignore the Coding Assistant and the new Agentic SDLC. For anyone seriously contributing to codebases today, the day to day work has change drastically over the last 6 months.

I was wondering how the orchestrators like Github Copilot were working, but despite the client code is open source and now part of the VSCode repository, it appears a large part of the code sits behind the API.

Anyway, it leads me to discover I was using on a daily basis a tool which I had NO understanding whatsoever: the Integrated Development Environment.

This, my friends, is the beginning of a tech journey 🚀

Thanks to Clément and Antoine for offering their help brainstorming the topic with me. If you want to follow me in this rabbit hole, I’ll document the following experimentation:

• Taking a simple language like Brainfuck
• Supporting it in VSCode: syntax highlighting, linting, running and debugging

I hope to discover many things, and as a north star, I dream of being able to contribute one day to an IDE like VSCode or Zed.