Designing AI Coding Tools: Inside Visual Studio & VS Code Agents

What if designers didn’t just use coding tools but helped build them? In this episode of Cozy AI Kitchen, Rohan Malpani (Principal Designer for Visual Studio & VS Code) walks through how AI is reshaping developer tools, from creating reusable “skills” in Visual Studio to building features with agents inside VS Code. We get into agents vs. skills, real workflows (not just vibe coding), and how teams are actually shipping production-ready AI-assisted code. If you’re curious how AI is changing the way developers and designers collaborate, and what it really takes to go beyond prototypes, this one’s worth a watch. Chapters: 00:00 Intro – Should designers build coding tools? 00:08 Welcome to Cozy AI Kitchen 00:18 Meet Rohan Malpani (Visual Studio & VS Code) 01:08 AI “Skills” in Visual Studio explained 02:15 Creating a skill with AI (live demo) 03:10 How skills work like reusable “recipes” 03:44 VS Code Agents Window overview 04:32 Agents vs. Skills (what’s the difference?) 05:44 Using agents to build developer tools 06:30 Designing with AI inside your own repo 07:03 Iterating on features with agents 08:01 How teams ensure code quality & security 09:02 Beyond vibe coding: real engineering workflows 10:18 AI-assisted development in production 11:01 Live iteration: improving the agents experience 12:01 Advice for designers & devs using AI Speakers: Rohan Malpani https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohanmalpani/ John Maeda - Host, Cozy AI Kitchen VP of Design and Artificial Intelligence, Microsoft https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmaeda/ 🎯 Explore more Cozy AI Kitchen episodes https://aka.ms/CAIK-YTPlaylist 🔔 Subscribe for more Microsoft Developer content