There is so much low-hanging fruit in the tooling side right now. There's no way Anthropic alone can stay ahead of it all -- we need lots of different teams trying different things.
I myself have been building a special-purpose vibe-coding environment and it's just astounding how easy it is to get great results by trying totally random ideas that are just trivial to implement.
Lots of companies are hoping to win here by creating the tool that everyone uses, but I think that's folly. The more likely outcome is that there are a million niche tools and everyone is using something different. That means nobody ends up with a giant valuation, and open source tools can compete easily. Bad for business, great for users.
(Also, Kenton, I'd add that I'm an admirer more broadly of your work, and so if by chance you end up creating some public project commercial or open source in the general vein we're talking about here, I'd love to contribute)
Yep. And in a way this has always been the story. It's why there's just so few companies making $$ in the pure devtooling space.
I have no idea what JetBrain's financials are like, but I doubt they're raking in huge $$ despite having very good tools & unfortunately their attempts to keep abreast of the AI wave have been middling.
Basically, I need Claude Code with a proper review phase built in. I need it to slow-the-fuck-down and work with me more closely instead of shooting mountains of text at me and making me jam on the escape key over and over (and shout WTF I didn't ask for that!) at least twice a day.
IHMO these are not professional SWE tools right now. I use them on hobby projects but struggle to integrate them into professional day jobs where I have to be responsible in a code review for the output they produced.
And, again, it's not the LLM that's at fault. It's the steering wheel driving it missing a basic non-yeet process flow.