VS Code
What is VS Code?
VS Code (Visual Studio Code) is a code editor and integrated development environment (IDE) developed by Microsoft that has become popular for AI product development. Teams use VS Code for evolving from early experimentation—often in Jupyter Notebooks—to production-quality code that needs to be committed to repositories and deployed across environments.
VS Code is free, open-source, and supports both traditional code files and Jupyter Notebooks, making it versatile for both data science and software engineering work.
Why is VS Code valuable for AI development?
A key advantage of VS Code for AI work is the ability to integrate AI assistants like Claude Code directly into the IDE. This integration allows developers to:
Get real-time coding assistance with full context. Unlike standalone chat interfaces, AI assistants embedded in VS Code have access to your entire project—all files, dependencies, and structure. This context enables more relevant and accurate coding suggestions.
Transition smoothly from experiments to production. Developers can start with Jupyter Notebooks for experimentation and data visualization, then move code into proper files when it's ready for deployment—all within the same environment.
Deploy code across environments. When evals or AI features need to run as guardrails in production, having code in VS Code (rather than notebooks) makes it easier to commit to GitHub and deploy to dev and prod environments.
When should teams move from notebooks to VS Code?
Many AI developers start with Jupyter Notebooks for rapid experimentation—they allow you to write code, test ideas, document results, and visualize data all in the same file.
As the codebase grows in number of evals and complexity, moving to VS Code becomes valuable. VS Code provides better organization for larger codebases, proper version control integration, and the ability to structure code for deployment rather than just experimentation.
Learn more:
- Building My First AI Product: 6 Lessons from My 90-Day Deep Dive
- How I Designed & Implemented Evals for Product Talk's Interview Coach
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