alt Hacker NewsI find it so weird that people are so bullish on the CLI form factor when they are literally just adding functionality that IDE based agents get for free. Stuff like improved diff tools and LSP support in the terminal instead of idk... just using a GUI/IDE?
Pretty sure Cursor has had this for a while.
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I just saw a video of non-technical person describing how they use claude code to automate various workflows. They actually tried vscode and then the desktop gui.
Yet they preferred the CLI because it felt "more natural"
With agents, and Claude Code, we are *orchestrating* ... this is an unresolved UI/UX in industry. The same reasons `kubectl` didn't evolve to GUI probably apply here.
It's less about the codebase, more about the ability to conduct anything on the computer - you are closest to that in the terminal. https://backnotprop.com/blog/its-on-your-computer/
What IDE agent gets access to LSP?
I use Zed and unless there is some MCP server that provides the same thing as the LSP server, the Zed agent won't have access, even though it's in an IDE that supposedly has this information
Well my editor is in the terminal, so is my chatbot. I dont really want to change to an IDE to use a desktop app and a chatbot that both have half-baked UIs trying to complement each other.
For many of us, the plus of the CLI form factor is it doesn't tie us to a particular IDE.
IDEs have LSP support because they have a plugin that connects to an LSP server. The plugin is a very small piece of code compared to the language server. Creating a new client is not reinventing the wheel. In fact the entire philosophy of LSP is: one server to many different clients.
CLIs can also have a small piece of code that connects to an LSP server. I don’t see why IDEs should be the sole beneficiary of LSP just because they were the first clients imagined by the LSP creators.