Turning VS Code into a
Visual Studio Code is no longer just a developer tool. It’s now a highly malleable and embeddable product platform. Looking at it beyond a code editor, it's actually a general-purpose application shell with a familiar UI, plugin system, command framework, and cross-platform runtime. Recently it's been used as the platform for several major AI products, but more quietly it's also been used for much more, from cloud IDEs to domain-specific editors and internal dev tools.
In this series of posts, I’ll show how I’ve been turning VS Code into a reusable module; something you can embed, extend, and ship as part of your own product.
I never thought the developer ecosystem would embrace a single editor as much as it has VS Code. Its dominance as a general-purpose coding environment is undeniable. This popularity and familiarity is one reason to build on it, but there are other attributes that make it a solid building block:
Generalized Design: It was designed not just as an editor, but as an integrated environment for various tools involved in the development workflow and beyond.
