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".
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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 :)
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.
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.
