Show HN: Daily install trends of AI coding extensions in VS Code
10 comments
·October 14, 2025candiddevmike
Doesn't the GitHub Copilot extension come with VSCode by default? Does every VSCode install count as a GitHub Copilot install?
AznHisoka
As far as I know, the extension is not installed by default. Copilot is integrated into the IDE, but you still need to sign in to Github and enable it to use it, and I think only then does it count as an installation. (I might be wrong though, any Microsoft developers want to chime in?)
AznHisoka
Looking at my VS Code IDE (recently updated), I have Copilot integrated but it's not yet installed by default: https://ibb.co/rKd6tsxy
janpio
Nice.
Feature suggestion: Let users select the timeframe to display, similar to https://npmtrends.com/express
AznHisoka
Thanks, I'll try and add that to the next iteration :)
Poomba
It would be great if u could overlay a HN sentiment chart over all of these tools.
null
spiffytech
Can you add Kilo Code to the list?
AznHisoka
I just added it :) https://bloomberry.com/coding-tools.html?tools=Kilo+Code
hanifbbz
Interesting stats.
For the past 4 years, I've been tracking the install counts of AI coding extensions in the Visual Studio Code marketplace (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, etc.)
Today, I built an interactive dashboard that lets you see daily install counts for any of them over time.
The chart shows GitHub Copilot by default, and you can overlay or swap in any of the other 20+ tools to compare. You can also see important dates in each tool's history (pricing changes, major releases, etc.) and how daily installs changed around those dates.
Important caveats:
1) This only tracks VS Code extension installs, not CLI usage or other IDEs like JetBrains.
2) Cursor isn't included since it's a standalone editor (VS Code fork), not a marketplace extension. I added a second chart showing Cursor discussion forum activity as a proxy for its growth.
Obviously not apples to apples, but felt I needed to measure Cursor's growth somehow.
3) This tracks daily installs per day, NOT total installs. Otherwise the charts would be boring and always go to the top and right.
4) The dashboard was coded using an AI coding assistant too. I used regular Claude :)