Architectury Loom vs Visual Studio Code

Architectury Loom is a free Gradle plugin for setting up development environments for Minecraft mods. It supports Fabric, Forge, NeoForge, and Quilt, and is described as a ForgeGradle replacement based on FabricMC Loom. Developers can choose Yarn, Official Mojang Mappings, or MCP mappings. Loom uses Fernflower and CFR to generate source code with comments. The documented IDE support is IntelliJ IDEA and Visual Studio Code; other IDEs are not tested or supported. The project requires Gradle 8.1 or newer and runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its documentation labels the project experimental and says issues may arise, with reports directed to the issue tracker. The repository uses the MIT license, and community discussion is available through Discord. The latest listed release is 1.17, which includes an API for converting access wideners to access transformers for Forge and NeoForge.

Visual Studio Code is an open-source code editor with AI-assisted development features for macOS, Linux, Windows, and the web. It offers inline AI suggestions and intelligent completions, and its agent workflows can plan tasks, change code, run commands, and iterate. Users can switch between agent work and direct coding in the same editor. Agent workflows work with Copilot and third-party providers, and users can supply their own model key. The editor includes JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS, and HTML support; extensions add support for other languages. Its Marketplace lists more than 80,000 extensions. Built-in tools include Git source control, an integrated terminal, code running and debugging, build tasks, and local history. It connects to GitHub Codespaces and remote development environments, while Settings Sync and profiles help carry and organize customizations. The browser version has a limited execution environment. VS Code is free for private or commercial use at free. A GitHub account is required to start building with AI agents.