The editor can see my code now
The model moves into my editor and the copy-paste tax finally falls — but a quieter problem shows up in its place
In April I ended a note with a question. The model could write the code; I was still the courier. Browser to editor, editor to browser, ferrying snippets across a gap that shouldn't exist. The intelligence lived in one window, my work lived in another, and I spent my day carrying buckets between them.
Then someone in a Slack channel mentioned an editor where the model just lives inside it. A VS Code fork. I installed it expecting a gimmick.
It can see my code now. That is the whole thing, and it is enormous. I select a function, ask, and it answers about this function, not a generic one it imagined. No pasting context. No re-explaining what file I'm in. The bucket-carrying stopped.
I sat with an old client project that night, one of those tangled PHP corners I'd been avoiding for weeks. I described what I wanted in plain Czech-accented English and watched changes land in place, in context, where they belonged. An hour. Maybe less.
GitHub is rolling its own version of this into Copilot, the chat that knows your repo. Everyone's arriving at the same door from different streets. The editor stops being a place you type and becomes a place you converse.
I keep noticing something, though. The model writes me an upload handler. Tomorrow it writes another, slightly different. Next week, a third. Each one fresh, each one fine, none of them the same, none of them mine. It has no memory of having solved this before. Brilliant and amnesiac.
Twenty-two years building software na míru, and the friction I most wanted gone is finally going. But the new friction is quieter, and I don't think it goes away by writing faster.