alt Hacker NewsAll of this might as well be greek to me. I use ChatGPT and copy paste code snippets. Which was bleeding edge a year or two ago, and now it feels like banging rocks together when reading these types of articles. I never had any luck integrating agents, MCP, using tools etc.
Like if I'm not ready to jump on some AI-spiced up special IDE, am I then going to just be left banging rocks together? It feels like some of these AI agent companies just decided "Ok we can't adopt this into the old IDE's so we'll build a new special IDE"?_Or did I just use the wrong tools (I use Rider and VS, and I have only tried Copilot so far, but feel the "agent mode" of Copilot in those IDE's is basically useless).
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Yeah if you've not used codex/agent tooling yet it's a paradigm shift in the way of working, and once you get it it's very very difficult to go back to the copy-pasta technique.
There's obviously a whole heap of hype to cut through here, but there is real value to be had.
For example yesterday I had a bug where my embedded device was hard crashing when I called reset. We narrowed it down to the tool we used to flash the code.
I downloaded the repository, jumped into codex, explained the symptoms and it found and fixed the bug in less than ten minutes.
There is absolutely no way I'd of been able to achieve that speed of resolution myself.
> I never had any luck integrating agents
What exactly do you mean with "integrating agents" and what did you try?
The simplest (and what I do) is not "integrating them" anywhere, but just replace the "copy-paste code + write prompt + copy output to code" with "write prompt > agent reads code > agent changes code > I review and accept/reject". Not really "integration" as much as just a workflow change.
I recently pasted an error I found into claude code and asked who broke this. It found the commit and also found that someone else had fixed it in their branch.
You should use claude code.
I used to do it the way you were doing it. A friend went to a hackathon and everyone was using Cursor and insisted that I try it. It lets you set project level "rules" that are basically prompts for how you want things done. It has access to your entire repo. You tell the agent what you want to do, and it does it, and allows you to review it. It's that simple; although, you can take it much further if you want or need to. For me, this is a massive leap forward on its own. I'm still getting up to speed with reproducible prompt patterns like TFA mentions, but it's okay to work incrementally towards better results.
I also sympathize with that approach, and found it sometimes better than agents. I believe some of the agentic IDEs are missing a "contained mode".
Let me select lines in my code which you are allowed to edit in this prompt and nothing else, for these "add a function that does x" without starting to run amok
I feel like just use claude code. That is it. Use it you get the feel for it. Everyone is over complicating.
It is like learning to code itself. You need flight hours.
You just didn't drink enough cool-aid and have intact brain.
Copilot's agent mode is a disaster. Use better tools: try Claude Code or OpenCode (my favorite).
It's a new ecosystem with its own (atrocious!) jargon that you need to learn. The good news is that it's not hard to do so. It's not as complex or revolutionary as everyone makes it look like. Everything boils down to techniques and frameworks of collecting context/prompt before handing it over to the model.
The idea is to produce such articles, not read them. Do not even read them as the agent is spitting them out - simply feed straight into another agent to verify.
I am on the other side, I have given the complete control of my computer to Claude Code - Yolo Mode. Sudo. It just works. My servers run the same. I SSH into Claude Code there and let them do whatever work they need to do.
So my 2 cents. Use Claude Code. In Yolo mode. Use it. Learn with it.
Whenever I post something like this I get a lot of downvots. But well ... end of 2026 we will not use computer the way we use them now. Claude Code Feb 2025 was the first step, now Jan 2026 CoWork (Claude Code for everyone else) is here. It is just a much much more powerful way to use computers.
I'm doing the same. My reason is not the IDE, I just can't let AI agent software onto my machine. I have no trust at all in it and the companies who make this software. I neither trust them in terms of file integrity nor for keeping secrets secret, and I do have to keep secrets like API keys on my file system.
Am I right in assuming that the people who use AI agent software use them in confined environments like VMs with tight version control?
Then it makes sense but the setup is not worth the hassle for me.
I don't think so it seems the aspiration of these tools is it'll be agents all the way down.
A high level task is given and outpops a working solution.
A) If you can't program and you're just happy to have something working you're safe.
B) If you're an experienced programmer and can specify the structure of the solution you're safe.
In between, is where it seems people will struggle. How do you get from A to B.
I'm so happy someone else says this, because I'm doing exactly the same. I tried to use agent mode in vs code and the output was still bad. You read simple things like: "We use it to write tests". I gave it a very simple repository, said to write tests, and the result wasn't usable at all. Really wonder if I'm doing it wrong.