Thanks for the responses folks.
I DIY’ed a mill and a lathe to CNC many years ago with Mach3 and Mach4. Have been watching channels like Saunders since the beginning 
I was hoping that similar to Mach, you could get a feel for the controller software without a machine. I had been reading these forums and hearing stuff like Quick Actions which seemed interesting
@gdon_2003, I wanted to ask a question. To start, I was hoping to use Carbide Create V7 for simple designs and Fusion360 for the rest. If Carbide Create is encrypting the gcode and using custom functions, that would seem to preclude using VSCode to analyze / modify the gcode output. It also seems like it would be difficult for Fusion post processors to match the functions that Carbide Create has. (Maybe I am overthinking this).