The issue I continue to have with many AI coding tools is they want me to use their own editor ("native", aka VSCode fork, or in the browser like this). I have zero intention of moving away from IDEA and nothing I've seen so far is good enough to make me want to switch. I really with there was more of "bringing AI into your existing tools/workflows" instead of "here is a new tool with AI baked in".
I have started using Claude Dev (an extension for VSCode - https://github.com/saoudrizwan/claude-dev), and so far my impression has been very positive. It’s a full blown code agent that looks for relevant files in the code base, can ask you to run commands and modify files etc.
You use your own Anthropic API key or self hosted model.
It is quite similar but I found aider a bit clunky to use in that it creates a new commit with a huge message being the whole conversation and context. Which can be a good thing of course, but for most things I'd rather accumulate changes until a feature is finished, then I commit.
I use aider with the --no-auto-commits flag. Then review code and do manual edits in VSCode, as well as manual git process. It achieves exactly what you're saying.
Aider remains to me one of the places where innovation happens and it seems to end up in other places. Their new feature to architect with o1 and then code with sonnet is pretty trippy.
I think the default is not to do this anymore (at least the whole convo and chat aren't in the commit). It is strangely scary to have it commit on every change, even if that's probably objectively the right thing for it to do (so you can roll back, so that commits are atomic, etc, etc).
Claude Dev does have a really nice UI nailed down. I was not aware that you could run local models yourself with it, which would be a great feature but kind of obviates the name.
The problem is that tacking on to an existing product, while the ideal approach, limits just how creative you can get. I believe this is one of the reasons Cursor had to fork VSCode. Simply being an extension limited the features they could build.
I completely get this and I don’t have a good answer to the issue. I almost wish I liked VSCode since almost all AI editors are forks of that (not sure what the extension compatibility story is), but prefer IDEA.
> (not sure what the extension compatibility story is)
So far I've had all the vscode extensions just work in cursor (including devcontainers, docker, etc.) I hope it continues like this, as breaking extensions is something that would take away from the usefulness of cursor.
I am also using intelliJ, but have started tinkering with Cursor
My hunch says that IDEA should be worried a lot. If I am on the edge evaluating other tools because of AI assisted programming, lot of others would be doing that too
Solid point. We’re building in a space adjacent to this and it definitely feels hard to balance removing friction for adoption and delivering everything we want.
Who said what we want has anything to do with our vision. Please don’t make assumptions about what drives our product development.
What I want in a product comes from customer interviews. It’s not “my opinion” other than perhaps our team’s interpretation of customer requests. A customer can want certain pain points addressed and have friction to move to a particular solution at the same time.
Or does wanting a product that meets customer needs too opinionated?
One thing I noticed though is that when autocompleting C++ statements like if or while it will add only the opening curly braces which is a bit annoying but makes sense. But it also sometimes adds them @_@
I feel the exact same! I built this tool to make it much easier for me to bring LLMs into existing workflows: https://github.com/gr-b/repogather
It helps find relevant content to copy to your clipboard (or just copies all files in the repo, with exclusions like gitignore attended to) so you can paste everything into Claude. With the large context sizes, I’ve found that I get way better answers / code edits by dumping as much context as possible (and just starting a new chat with each question).
It’s funny, Anthropic is surely losing money on me from this, and I use gpt-mini via api to compute the relevancy ratings, so OpenAI is making money off me, despite having (in my opinion) an inferior coding LLM / UI.
I do something similar with a script. Don’t know if anything about my approach could improve yours, but I’m also curious if you have any suggestions?
- Mine prepends the result with the output of running `tree -I node_modules --noreport` before any other content. This informs the LLM of the structure of the project, which leads to other insights like it will know which frameworks and paradigms your project uses without you needing to explain that stuff.
- Mine prepends the contents of each included file with “Contents of relative/path/to/file/from/root/of/project/filename.ts:” to reinforce the context and the file’s position in the tree.
Tabnine has an IDEA plugin. It's not quite as good as Cursor, in my opinion, but it's better to have Tabnine and IDEA than Cursor and VSCode.
It started out as just predictive text, but now it has a chatbot window that you can access GPT, Claude, etc. from, as well as their own model which has better assurances about code privacy.
Just use aider - it’s CLI and open source. You can open terminal in IDE and you just use /add file for context then /drop to clean context. Better than Copilot and just less worse UX than Cursor (which has benefit of knowing which page you have open). There’s also Claude engineer but not tested it yet.
Forgot to mention killer feature - droping links to docs automatically fetches them in aider which helps with grounding for specific tasks
Look, I'm just not interested in something that gives me code on the CLI. This is no better or worse than using ChatGPT / Canvas or any other external tool.
My project has well over half a million lines of code. I'm using an IDE (in my case Qt Creator) for a reason. I'd love to get help from an LLM but CLI or external browser windows just aren't the way. The overhead of copy/paste and lack of context is a deal breaker unfortunately.
In case I'm missing something, please let me know. I'm always happy to learn.
What I'm trying right now is two IDEs -- PyCharm for navigating around and static analysis stuff, Cursor for "how do I do this" or "please do this for me." Cursor (VSCode?) lets you choose Jetbrains keyboard shortcuts during setup and is relatively resource light so it's not too bad.
Aider operates on your file tree / repo and edits and creates files in place. So it at least lessens the copy / paste drastically. This is a very different experience than using chatgpt or Claude on web. Still not ideal UX compared to having it in the IDE though to be clear.
This is not an issue. Technology moves forward. You don't adapt, you fall behind. There were other editors and IDE's before the one you use. New devs will use it.
Anyway, I don't use them either. I prefer to use ChatGPT and Claude directly.
Almost every program I've used 20 years ago still available today. I think that I switched from Eclipse to Idea like 15 years ago, but Eclipse is still rocking. IT really frozen in 1990s. OS didn't change at all, they just switch fancy colors and border radius every few years. Software is the same, they just add more annoying bugs and useless features, but nothing really changes. I'm still using the same unix shell and unix tools I've used 20 years ago, I'm still greping and seding files around.
Overall I agree with everything you’ve said and I also use ChatGPT and Claude directly. The issue is that:
Good at integrating AI into a text editor != Good at building an IDE.
I worry about the ability for some of these VSCode forks to actually maintain a fork and again, I greatly prefer the power of IDEA. I’ll switch if it becomes necessary, but right now the lack of deep AI integration is not compelling enough to switch since I still have ways of using AI directly (and I have Copilot).
I'm guessing using AI will fundamentally change how IDE even works. Maybe everything IDE's offer right now is not needed when you have a copilot you tell what to do.
I'm a long term vim user. I find all the IDE stuff distracting and noisy. With AI makes it even more noisy. I'm guessing the new generation will just be better at using it. Similar to how we got good at "googling stuff".
It’s a mistake to assume that there will be 100% correlation between the past and future, but it’s probably as bad of a mistake to assume 0% correlation. (Obviously dependant on exactly what you are looking at).
That’s my point – they are not. Your previous comment implied to me a belief that any attempt to draw inference from past events was doomed to failure!
Each circumstance is different. Sometimes the past is a good guide to the future – even for the notoriously unpredictable British weather apparently you can get a seventy percent success rate (by some measure) by predicting that tomorrows weather will be the same as todays. Sometimes it is not - the history of an ideal roulette wheel should offer no insights into future numbers.
The key is of course to act in accordance with the probability, risk and reward.
This is exactly what OpenAI and other want you to believe. "OH NO, I need to use LLMs for coding otherwise I will fall behind". No, no. Most of what makes a good software engineer cannot be replaced by LLMs. A good software engineer has a deep understanding of the problem space, works on the right things, and elevates their team members by coaching, helping etc. It's not about how fast you type your code.
I refuse to believe there were ever editors before vim.
Vim has been around since the Stone Age.
Jokes aside, I don’t really see why ai tools need new editors vs plugins EXCEPT that they don’t want to have to compete with Microsoft’s first party AI offerings in vscode.
It’s just a strategy for lock-in.
An exception may be like zed, which provides a lot of features besides AI integration which require a new editor.
Sure, I just don’t see what an AI first editor would have over vscode, vim, or whatever already exists + an extension.
The editor handles the human to text file interface, handling key inputs, rendering, managing LSPs, providing hooks to plugins, etc. AI coding assistants kind of sits next to sits it just handles generating text.
It’s why many of these editors just fork vscode. All the hard work is already done, they just add lock in as far as I can tell.
Again, zed is an exception in this pack bc of its CRDT and cooperative features. Those are not things you can easily add on to an existing editor.
I used this while Cursor was broken (Pylance problems), but Continue's code replace tooling sometimes will delete huge swaths of adjacent code. I've filed a comprehensive ticket in their repo and they're working on it, but I've been able to reproduce the problem recently.
I think it has to do with Cursor's much better custom small models for code search/replace, but can't be sure.
I tried it a while back and had a lot of trouble getting it to work, it's on my list to try again. I also tried Sourcegraph's Cody and just constant errors even after paying for the Pro plan so now I'm back on Copilot.
Hey, product manager from sourcegraph here. Sorry to hear you got errors. What were the errors, and where were you using Cody (VS Code, Web, or JetBrains)?
Gotcha. Our JetBrains IDE has improved a lot since then, we've been focusing a ton on making performance better. If you could, would love to get you trying Cody again! I can even throw in 1 month free for you, I think I see your customer profile in Stripe :)
So, I think that with the agent frameworks that exist now, that wouldn't be very hard to realize. What's needed though would be a full API for the editor that can be tapped into.
Ironically, for creating that, these new age code editor startups would probably have more luck with neovim and it's extensive lua API rather than with vs code. (Of course, the idea with using a vs code fork is about capturing the market share it has).
> I have zero intention of moving away from IDEA and nothing I've seen so far is good enough to make me want to switch. I really with there was more of "bringing AI into your existing tools/workflows" instead of "here is a new tool with AI baked in".
For this, either GitHub Copilot or their own AI plugin seem to work nicely.
Because of this, and the fact that every additional IDE/tool you have to support also means similar development work, most companies out there will probably lean in the direction of either a web based UI, a CLI, or their own spin of VS Code or something similar.
I'll use Continue when a chat is all I want to generate some code/script to copy paste in. When I need to prepare a bigger input I'll use the CLI tool in Sophia (sophia.dev) to generate the response.
I use Aider sometimes, less so lately, although it has caught up with some features in Sophia (which builds on top of Aider), being able to compile, and lint, and separating design from the implementation LLM call. With Aider you have to manually add/drop files from the context, which is good for having precise control over which files are included.
I use the code agent in Sophia to build itself a fair bit. It has its own file selection agent, and also a review agent which helps a lot with fixing issues on the initial generated changes.
Continue.dev's plugin is as close as it gets for Cursor, but there are clearly limitations to a VSCode plugin when it comes to the inline editing and code search/replace - made a comment above about it.
I am actually building something along these lines, IntelliJ native rather than a second class VS Code follow along. Is this something you (or your company) would pay for? Say $50/year for the plugin and you bring your own API keys?
Zed lets you set it up trivially with jetbrains key maps. It doesn’t have a debugger and rough around the edges but I like that most of my Jetbrains shortcuts continue to work with zed.
The primary issue is that IDEA and other editors don’t allow the level of flexibility and customizability needed to make new experiences, unlike VSCode. Whether new solutions need to fork it or not is a different question. For example, Cursor absolutely has made significant changes for user benefit that stock VSCode with Copilot doesn’t have.
I’m a professional IntelliJ plugin developer, this is absolutely not true. IntelliJ is incredibly customisable, and you can always code raw swing to achieve whatever you want if there’s something that the base platform doesn’t provide.
Appreciate the added perspective, I wasn’t aware. But from my usage of IDEA’s product, I’ve yet to find an extension that makes any major changes to the UI/UX? I see them way more often in the VSCode community. In fact, I find the IDEA plugin system incredibly limited overall. Why do you think that’s the case? Or maybe I’ve been in a bubble and you can point to some interesting ones that I’ve maybe missed?
More than it not being possible, it's not regarded as desirable - IntelliJ users greatly value consistency. The fact that the experience is consistent across different languages is one of the things I like best about IntelliJ. Can you give me an idea of the sort of thing that you'd like to see that you haven't seen?
Here's an example of something I recently added (an inline inspector), that my main competitor (VS Code) said wasn't possible with the VS Code APIs: https://cursive-ide.com/blog/cursive-1.14.0-eap1.html. I have another major feature that I don't have good online doc for, which is also not possible with the VS Code API (parinfer, a Clojure editing mode). This gives you an idea of what it looks like, but this is old and my implementation doesn't work much like this any more: https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer.
Likely because ~70% of OpenAI’s revenue comes from ChatGPT Plus/Teams/Enterprise. Model access is just not as profitable, so slapping on features to encourage upgrades is their best path forward.
The icky demo of how much worse /r/LinkedinLunatics is going to get aside: is this the front foot of a globe-spanning, cutting edge research lab at the very efficient frontier of human and machine intelligence?
Or is it yet another lame distraction effort around the abject and embarrassing failure to ship GPT-5?
These people are pretty shameless in ways that range from “exceedingly poor taste” to “interstate wire fraud” depending on your affiliation, but people who ship era-defining models after all the stars bounced they are not.
