VS Code is itself an evolution of the Monaco editor, another MS open source product. The secret sauce in Cursor is not being an editor. It's in orchestrating the various system prompts, user prompts, and inputs to the IDE that give it the agentic qualities.
I love VS Code and used it for years until recently switching to Cursor. But let's be honest -- neither product really has an attractive interface. VS Code feels like it was put together out of building blocks rather than designed as a whole, and that's because it was.
That plug-in nature is great but isn't the key thing that agentic devs need. Someone will make an IDE from the ground up that is optimized for working with agents rather than files and folders and lines of code. Those will need to move to the background in the new paradigm.
