It’s…a VSCode fork? Really? What has become of Google? Ten years ago, when I was getting into the world of software, there was still an aura about them. They built everything in this huge monorepo, and it worked. They were this deeply technical company for whom it seems anything could be done.

And now they can’t even ship a desktop app without forking VSCode? Look, I get it. There’s this huge ecosystem. Everyone uses it. I’m not saying it’s damning or even bad to fork it.

But why is this being painted as something revolutionary? It’s a reskin of all the other tools which are variations on the same theme, dressed up in business speak (an agent-first UX!). I’m sure it’s OK. I downloaded it. The default Tokyo Night theme is unusable; the contrast can’t be read. I picked Vim bindings, but as soon as I tried to edit a file I noticed that was ignored.

What happened? Is this how these beautiful, innovative companies are bound to end up?