VS Code and Agentic Development with Kai Maetzel
Visual Studio Code has become one of the most influential tools in modern software development. The open-source code editor has evolved into a platform used by millions of developers around the world, and it has reshaped expectations for what a modern development environment can be through its intuitive UX, rich extension marketplace, and deep integration
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VS Code and Agentic Development with Kai Maetzel
By SEDaily
** Podcast
Tuesday, January 6 2026
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Visual Studio Code has become one of the most influential tools in modern software development. The open-source code editor has evolved into a platform used by millions of developers around the world, and it has reshaped expectations for what a modern development environment can be through its intuitive UX, rich extension marketplace, and deep integration with today’s tooling landscape. Now, in an era defined by rapid advances in AI-assisted programming, VS Code is at the center of a profound shift in how software is written.
Kai Maetzel is the Engineering Manager leading the VS Code team at Microsoft. He joins the show with Kevin Ball to talk about the origins of VS Code, how AI has reshaped the editor’s design philosophy, the rise of agentic programming models, and what the future of development might look like.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
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