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Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats

1008: Diffs, Trees, and VS Code 2.0

Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats

Wes Bos

Tech News, Technology, News

4.91.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2026

⏱️ 60 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Scott and Wes sit down with Alex Sexton and Amadeus De Marzi from Pierre Computer to dig into the gnarly performance challenges behind building blazing-fast code review tools, covering virtualization, progressive rendering, and why GitHub’s UI feels so sluggish. They also chat about how major AI coding tools like Claude, Codex, and Cursor are adopting Pierre’s diffs library, plus the role of web components, benchmarking, and what it takes to build “VS Code 2.0.” Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 04:00 The Need for Better Infrastructure 05:53 Understanding Diffs and Trees diffs.com Trees by the Pierre Computer Co 08:16 Performance Challenges in Code Review 10:49 Virtualization Techniques for Smooth Scrolling 15:04 In-Page Find and Virtualization Limitations 17:00 Browser Limitations and Content Visibility 19:29 Progressive Rendering and Syntax Highlighting 23:05 Tools and Techniques for Performance Testing 33:35 Optimizing Performance with AI 36:31 Mastering Auto Research for Efficiency 42:00 Exploring Web Components and State Management 44:05 Innovations in Rendering and Virtualization 49:12 Business Insights and Future Directions 53:58 Sick Picks Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to Syntax. Today we've got Alex Sexton and Amadeus Demarzi. Apologies if I goof that up,

0:08.4

but we are talking to them because they are building the primitives for something that Claude

0:15.9

uses, OpenCode, Conductor, Codex. They're building,, they're building the building blocks for almost what would be

0:24.4

like a new VS code.

0:25.9

And it's really cool.

0:27.6

They're working on some pretty hard stuff and we're going to dive into it.

0:31.0

Let me just show you really quickly how impressive this is.

0:34.7

So one of the things, or two of the things that they build is diffs and a tree, which is basically like if you want to show a diff of code and if you want to

0:44.1

show like a tree in the sidebar of some files. And if you've been on GitHub lately,

0:49.2

you may have noticed it's a little bit chuggy. So here I am scrolling on GitHub and I'll just stop my thing.

0:56.4

There. There it is. Let me load down, scroll down a little bit. Have you ever tried to resize

1:01.6

GitHub before? It's like, let's just wait here a second while GitHub resizes.

1:08.1

Brutal. Yeah. Okay, there we go. So, oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. It's got literally, I'm not touching anything. For those of you who are just listening on audio, it is mega low FPS. It is mega lag taking forever to restructure, re, re-paint. And look at that. Watch how fast I can scroll. I have one of these, like, one of these, like, lodgetech mice where I can scroll super fast. Boom, boom, boom. Let's see how fast I can go. He's not scrolling fast, and it has much better. Thank you, Scott. I think even for video listeners, video watchers as well, it'll be lower FPS because this is probably

1:45.8

30 FPS. That's true. It is very, very fast. So welcome, guys. I just wanted to show the audience

1:51.5

before they tuned off that this is extremely impressive and I'm excited to talk to you about

1:56.7

everything you're building, how you're building it, and a couple of other things as well. So welcome.

2:02.3

Thanks. Thank you. I've been seeing your stuff pop up a lot lately in all

2:07.5

and seems like all different types of capacity. So do you want to quick give us an introduction

2:12.7

to who you both are and what you do? Sure. I'm Alex Sexton. I'm mostly JavaScript fronten engineer at Pierre Computer Company,

2:22.7

and we are structured around the idea of kind of making code developer tools for the next generation of, I should practice this,

2:36.0

the next generation of AI agent-based coding.

2:40.0

And so we have a core product called code storage,

...

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