Amp Kills Its VS Code Extension, Calls Sidebar Dead

Amp just announced it's killing its VS Code extension. Not deprecating it, not putting it in maintenance mode—killing it completely. The company's founders, Quinn Slack and Thorsten Ball, declared on their podcast that "the sidebar is dead" and they're going all-in on CLI and standalone tools instead.

This is worth examining because it represents a particular theory about how developers should work with AI coding assistants. Whether that theory is correct remains an open question.

Amp started as Cody at Sourcegraph, evolved into Amp, and recently spun out as its own company. Until now, it offered both a CLI tool and a VS Code extension. They'd been actively developing the extension—adding code review agents, a "deep mode," and even a free tier with ads. Then they reversed course entirely.

"We will be killing our editor extension, the AMP VS Code extension," Slack and Ball said on episode 10 of their Raising an Agent podcast. "We're going to be killing it because we think it's no longer the future. We think the sidebar is dead."

That's an aggressive position. The sidebar is dead. Not declining, not becoming less important—dead.

The Case Against the Sidebar

Amp's reasoning appears to be that developers should work with AI coding agents the same way they work with other tools: outside the editor, through command-line interfaces or standalone applications. This isn't a purely aesthetic choice. It's architectural. By moving outside VS Code, Amp gains complete control over the interface, the workflow, and the user experience.

They're also part of a broader industry trend. Several AI coding tools are trying to move away from being plugins inside someone else's platform. The logic is straightforward: if you're building the future of software development, why constrain yourself to a sidebar in an editor that was designed before large language models existed?

The CLI has genuine advantages for certain workflows. It fits naturally into automated processes, scripts, and CI/CD pipelines. For developers who prefer working in the terminal, it's home territory. And a standalone app can offer richer interfaces than a sidebar allows.

What This Costs

But here's what Amp is betting against: the reality that most developers spend their entire workday inside VS Code. According to Stack Overflow's most recent developer survey, VS Code has roughly 74% market share among professional developers. That's not a plurality—it's market dominance.

When your AI assistant lives in the sidebar, it can see your open files, your terminal output, your workspace structure. It has context automatically. Switching to a separate CLI or app means manually providing that context, or accepting that the AI has a narrower view of what you're doing.

Friction matters. Every context switch has a cognitive cost. AICodeKing, who covered this announcement in a YouTube video, makes this point directly: "You're already in your editor. Your code is right there and the AI can see everything. Going to a separate CLI or standalone app adds friction and friction is the enemy of productivity."

That's not a universal truth—some developers genuinely prefer terminal-based workflows—but it's true for enough people that dismissing the sidebar entirely seems premature.

The Alternative That Isn't Leaving

Kilo Code, an open-source alternative under Apache 2.0 license, is positioning itself as the natural landing spot for displaced Amp users. Unlike Amp, Kilo Code is explicitly committed to remaining a VS Code extension. They also offer a CLI tool, but they're not abandoning the editor integration.

The feature comparison is straightforward. Kilo Code supports over 500 models—Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, and local models through Ollama—versus Amp's more curated selection. It offers transparent pricing at raw API rates without markup. It provides $20 in free credits with no ads and no data training. It includes orchestrator and architect modes, a memory bank for project context, and MCP server support.

These are table stakes features for modern AI coding assistants, but the key differentiator is strategic: Kilo Code isn't declaring any particular interface dead. It's offering both options and letting developers choose.

What's Actually Happening Here

This isn't primarily about technology. It's about business model and product philosophy.

Amp likely sees a clearer path to building a defensible product outside the constraints of the VS Code extension marketplace. That's reasonable. The extension model means you're forever bound to VS Code's APIs, Microsoft's platform decisions, and the marketplace's discovery mechanisms. Building a standalone product gives you more control.

But declaring the sidebar dead is different from saying "we've chosen a different path." It's a bet that the way millions of developers currently work is obsolete, and they just haven't realized it yet.

I've covered enough technology transitions to know how this usually plays out. The old way persists longer than innovators expect. The new way arrives faster than incumbents believe. And the truth ends up being that both coexist for years, serving different use cases and different preferences.

The developers who prefer terminal workflows will follow Amp to the CLI. The developers who live in VS Code will migrate to alternatives like Kilo Code. And in five years, we'll likely have AI coding assistants that work seamlessly across both paradigms, because that's what the market actually wants.

The sidebar isn't dead. But it's also not the only future. Amp has chosen its bet. Now we'll see if the market agrees.

—Bob Reynolds, Senior Technology Correspondent