Definitely not a VSCode fork - it's written in Python for one thing :-) In fact it has very few package dependencies other than the standard python libs - just PySide6 and qasync to allow me to use the Qt widget set, and aiohttp to implement the client side of the REST interfaces to the AI backends. The only other dependency is on the m6rclib I wrote a few months ago - that's a prompt compiler engine and that has no dependencies either.

The "coded by AI" is because the AI did the bulk of the code generation leaving me to focus on the design, improving the structure, etc. There are a few places where I did more of the design work (e.g. the structure of the parsers and lexers used for syntax highlighting), but I had the AI do much of the refactoring.

To keep the AI on track I designed a lightweight language, Metaphor, that keeps it focused on the intent of what I want. There are currently about 1300 lines of Metaphor, describing the user-visible behaviour of a 15k lines of Python app.

Of course, I watch the AI pretty carefully to ensure it doesn't do weird things but give it the right context and it's pretty amazing to watch (there's a video of me having the AI build the JSON lexer/parser yesterday morning up on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-1XbJkHwHQ). For transparency, I did find one bug in the 300 lines it coded in the video :-)