I'm running terminal in one window with AI interaction and then VS Code with project on same directories so I can see via color coding updated or new files to review in the IDE.
How is that better than running your AI interaction in a dedicated toolpane/subwindow directly inside your IDE?
The Chat panel in VS Code has seen a lot of polish, can display full HTML including formatting Markdown nicely, has some fancy displays for AI context such as file links, supports hyperlinks everywhere, and has fancy auto-complete popups for things like @ and # and / mentioned "tools"/"agents"/whatever. Other VS Code widgets can show up in the Chat panel, too. The Chat Panel you can dock in either sidebar and/or float as its own window.
A terminal can do most of those things too, with effort and with nothing quite like the native experience of your IDE and its widgets. It seems like a lesser experience than what VS Code already offers, other than you only have one real choice for AI assistant that supports VS Code's Chat panel (though you still have model choice).
The "old wisdom" on comp/lang.perl.misc, when new people asked what was the best IDE to Perl programming, was "Unix".
You get both editors to choose from, vi _and_ emacs! All the man pages you could possibly want _and_ perldocs! Of _course_ as a Perl newbie you'll be able to fall back on gdb for complicated debugging where print statements no longer cut it.
How do you interact with your projects?