Visual Studio Code is unarguably one of the greatest engineering achievements of the last decade. Microsoft built a flawlessly optimized text-editing engine, backed by highly robust Git integrations, terminal physics, and a massive syntax-highlighting intelligence layer.
Re-building that base text engine from scratch to create a new AI editor is an enormous technical mistake. You end up spending three years debugging scrolling physics instead of actually building frontier AI workflows.
However, while the engine is perfect, the interface is fundamentally archaic.
If you build your AI architecture as a simple VS Code Extension (like Copilot, Cline, or Continue.dev), you are entirely shackled to Microsoft's interface constraints. You are forced to cram hyper-advanced agentic workflows into a rigid, 350-pixel vertical sidebar.
Your AI has to fight for visual hierarchy against the file explorer, source control, and a dozen other extensions. You cannot natively alter the workspace layout, you cannot introduce custom GPU graphic overlays, and you cannot dictate how the engine structurally prioritizes context windows.
We realized the only way to build an IDE optimally designed for Agentic Automation was to take the robust processing engine of VS Code, completely rip out the Microsoft presentation layer, and build an entirely new native macOS interface on top of it.
We call this Liquid Glass. We removed the concept of sidebars entirely, operating instead on a strict 4-tab maximal "No-Box UI". You still get 100% full compatibility with all your favorite VS Code keybindings, color themes, and terminal commands, but they exist inside a gorgeously sleek, distraction-free environment that allocates massive screen real-estate directly to your AI reasoning engines.