From Pain to Tool: How to Build Your Own VS Code Extension

Our documentation workflows rely heavily on custom-built tools and non-standard processes — from proprietary markup tags to unique build scenarios. To make working with this complex setup easier, we developed a custom VS Code extension that quickly became essential to our daily work.

In this talk, I’ll walk through the entire journey — from the initial idea to a fully functional extension. We'll cover setting up the development environment, working with the VS Code API, adding syntax highlighting, in-editor hints, decorators, and custom commands. At the end, you'll get a complete, working extension that you can adapt to your needs.