95% of My Work Happens in VS Code

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SPSS, R Studio — I don't use any of them anymore. Here's how VS Code with AI assistants replaced a dozen separate apps and made me dramatically more productive. Right now, as I write this, my desktop has six VS Code windows open. One for this article. One for a course I'm developing. One for a data analysis pipeline. One for a research paper draft. One for a custom tool I'm building. One for meeting prep. Behind them, a browser with a dozen tabs and my email. That's it. That's my entire workstation. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SPSS, R Studio, Endnote, even Overleaf in the browser — I barely use any of them anymore to actually do my work. And I don't miss them. Why VS Code? VS Code is a free, open-source code editor made by Microsoft. But calling it a "code editor" undersells it — it's a general-purpose working environment that handles text, code, data, notebooks, terminals, and extensions for almost anything you can imagine. Here's why I use it instead of a dozen