Aaron Munger
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amunger.bsky.social
Aaron Munger
@amunger.bsky.social
VS code developer, mostly in the notebook UX. Father of two in the Seattle suburbs. Hobbyist woodworker. eBike commuter. Beer enjoyer.
I'm just excited about how much easier it will be to diagnose user issues now that we can open up the prompts that it used.
Today, we're announcing plans to make VS Code an open source AI editor.

We believe AI development should stay true to VS Code's core principles: open, collaborative, and community-driven. Let's build the future of software development together.

aka.ms/open-source-...
May 19, 2025 at 10:06 PM
AI in code editors opened up so many new feature possibilities that I finally managed to think up a useful vs code extension that didn't already exist: Generate debug log point messages with Logpoint Generator. marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemNa...
April 21, 2025 at 1:08 AM
love these new completions.
Introducing the next evolution of completions in GitHub Copilot: Next Edit Suggestions (preview).

Learn more: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2025/02/12/next-edit-suggestions
February 12, 2025 at 6:45 PM
I'm still working through the "Crafting Compilers" book.
I spent at least an hour trying to figure out why my C program was returning something like 3.67e-307 for every value I was trying to store in a byte array. After adding a bunch of printf statements to debug, it just suddenly started working.
January 14, 2025 at 4:48 PM
PSA - 6 years old is a great time to be introduced to Star Wars. I'm through the original trilogy and episode I with my daughter, and she is loving it.

Seeing her reaction to "I am your father" was very satisfying.
January 3, 2025 at 2:03 AM
Give Copilot another shot if you already used up your trial period early on. It has improved quite a bit and a free tier is now available.
Announcing GitHub Copilot Free!

A new free tier for GitHub Copilot, available for everyone today in VS Code.

No trial. No subscription. No credit card required.

Learn more in our blog: aka.ms/copilot-free
December 19, 2024 at 4:23 AM
Me trying to step away from #AdventOfCode to regain several hours of my day.
December 18, 2024 at 4:49 PM
I don't understand why rust gets such an exceptional amount of love in those SO dev surveys. The learning curve feels so steep with all that syntax and the ownership restrictions.
I'm still willing to slog my way through as I learn it, but why does it appeal so widely?
December 16, 2024 at 2:35 PM
I finished #AdventOfCode day 13, but damn, I don't remember linear algebra being that tricky
December 13, 2024 at 10:25 PM
I love when the #AdventOfCode problems become time constrained because you see how powerful optimization can be - My solution went from not finishing after waiting for around a minute to 71 ms after optimization.

my solution: github.com/amunger/adve...
github.com
December 11, 2024 at 5:10 PM
I really appreciate it when humor is mixed into technical books, and Crafting Interpreters delivers well on that.
December 9, 2024 at 3:09 AM
I'm through part 2 of Crafting Interpreters and I even added arrays to the language for the jlox tree-walk interpreter as the final challenge exercise.

I wasn't sure how much I was picking up while reading through, but adding my own feature really helped cement the material in my mind.
December 8, 2024 at 2:55 AM
If you want copilot auto-completions for the tedious stuff, but don't want it when thinking through your #AdventOfCode solution. You can make a keybinding to toggle it on and off with the "Toggle" extension from @rebornix.com
December 6, 2024 at 4:50 PM
#AdventOfCode day 5: modified bubble sort to the rescue!
December 5, 2024 at 5:17 PM
Are there stats for how far people make it through advent of code each year? I'd be interested to see the trend as AI tools become more ubiquitous
December 1, 2024 at 1:47 AM
I was initially disturbed by importing functions in typescript and using them as if they were local but have grown comfortable with it. Now I can't stand seeing a class member used within the class without using prefixing with "this".
November 29, 2024 at 9:01 PM
You sometimes discover that a "bad practice" in software can actually be perfectly suited for a specific case.

The latest one for me was using exceptions for control flow to implement return statements while reading Crafting Interpreters.
November 26, 2024 at 10:34 PM
If a command isn't doing quite what you would expect in vs code, but you can't convince the developers to change the behavior, you might be able to adjust it yourself by combining commands in a custom key binding.
November 21, 2024 at 11:12 PM
Reposted by Aaron Munger
So we have this VS Code extension API for building Copilot Chat extensions: code.visualstudio.com/api/extensio... and a bunch of chat extensions have been published over the past 6 months. Sweet! 💯
Chat extensions
A guide to creating an AI extension in Visual Studio Code
code.visualstudio.com
November 20, 2024 at 2:02 PM
A top QOL improvement for working on a11y features is NVDA's speech viewer: right click the taskbar item -> tools -> speech viewer.
Not being a screen reader user myself, I find the audible narration incredibly distracting, and this way I can turn the narration volume to 0 and still test a11y.
November 14, 2024 at 4:39 PM
I still remember my first post on Reddit, replying to an r/explainbothsides post about UBI. It seemed pretty innocuous, but the OP apparently looked through my profile and replied with "What a strange first post!" and I still can't figure out why.
November 9, 2024 at 10:59 PM