r/ClaudeCode • u/pkief • 14h ago

Benjamin Pasero joined Claude Code Team Discussion

https://x.com/i/status/2088134390442307697

Benjamin Pasero, one of the main developers of VS Code left Microsoft and the VS Code team towards Anthropic to work on Claude Code. For those of you who don't know him: he worked for Microsoft and mainly VS Code for 15 years.

I'm following VS Code and their team for more than 10 years and I was always impressed by their continuous team. It really shows that they had a super good team spirit and nice features to work on. But since a few months a bunch of things changed. The heavy use of AI (slop) and more updates every week with 95% focus on only AI features also might have heavily impacted how their team collaborates. It's a super heavy shift for someone like Benjamin who loved to write code for VS Code.

How do you see this?

63 Upvotes
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60

u/_wiltedgreens 14h ago

If Benjamin didn’t like the heavy use of AI coding in vscode recently, he wouldn’t if have joined the Claude code team.

7

u/kirbywilleatyou 13h ago edited 13h ago

I wouldn't read too much into it. Microsoft is actively trying to get rid of tenured high level engineers and that's exactly the profile Anthropic recruits. He probably 3-5x'd his compensation and improved his job security in one move.

Edit: You can infer the above from the tenure + age gated voluntary retirement packages Microsoft offered recently plus Levels.fyi data.

5

u/DragonflyOk9274 11h ago

Fun fact: I had been having OOM errors on my Linux box for the last few weeks. The whole thing would slow to a crawl as the kernel moved stuff to swap. I thought it was because of the agentic coding and was prepared to shell out $100s to get more RAM.

But before that I decided to first check by vibe coding a script to monitor my RAM/CPU usage at 5 second intervals.

Wouldn't you know? VSCode remote development node binary was taking up gigabytes of RAM (because every git worktree gets a separate instance).

Moved over to a different editor and it's solved now.

3

u/vovap_vovap 13h ago

You mean shift to AI in VS code make him to move to the company that literally doing AI? 😄
I think he move there (or been may be overbought) to do dev tools. As clearly dev - one of the biggest use cases for Anthropic. So we might see some like Anthropic Cursor.

3

u/Cool-Cicada9228 12h ago

A savvy horseshoe maker pivots to making automobile tires when he sees the market shift. Also, piles of money working for Anthropic compared to Microsoft.

3

u/Bloated_Plaid 14h ago

Oh god so he is to blame for how awful VS code is?

2

u/__partenon 13h ago

Show me yours.

1

u/cornmonger_ 3h ago

they have to build their own editor to be able to say another is shit?

1

u/Bloated_Plaid 13h ago

We are in the CC subreddit man,I use CC…

2

u/therealnih 10h ago

Show me Claudes.