Right now there's a huge friction with IDEs, that if I have it open while claude is working on something, then any caches it has get stale very quickly, and it churns processing trying to keep up with edits.

Any leverage that claude could benefit from LSPs or language/AST MCPs is undone by that tooling not being able to keep up or stay fresh, so the IDE just "runs hot" for no purpose.

Which means I'm incentivised to close my IDE while claude is working, and now I've got used to not looking at the code.

Like you, I really want a system that works better. I want claude to search and edit through better tooling, it would be faster, more accurate, and should in theory be able to leverage compilers to apply edits better and more accurately.

I don't want claude wasting an awful lot of time grepping for things that a compiler cache can answer, but if that compiler cache can't keep up then it's actively harmful.

I'm sure there must be a better way, there must be a way to have smarter more change-aware cache invalidation, and smarter more cache-aware claude tool use, but so far none has happened.

Long term I'm sure the pairing will emerge, but unfortunately I don't think that's going to come from the IDE vendor side, it'll have to come out of some harness research lab, where Anthropic or a competitor finds a way to reliably leverage this stuff for a speed and accuracy boost.

It's completely bonkers to me that an LLM can almost "natively" read profiler output, but doing so involves vast amounts of text and context ingestion, when there are real tools sitting there that it ignores in preference for either reading vast amounts or iffy python one-shot scripts to parse stuff.

It’s not entirely what you’re asking for but do try to checkout https://onorca.dev

I was using just command line too and Orca just leveled up everything around it. Still using the cli but inside of Orca. I

> I still haven’t found an IDE that I feel really helps me develop with AI better than the command line.

With Codex GUI app and Astra you can communicate through screenshosts and collages. WAY faster and more precise for many types of jobs and workflows. Literally just scribble crap into the screens and it knows... no need to write out 50 paragraphs of prose to describe a button and its position.

I think this is what JetBrains Air is supposed to be. I haven't had a chance to test it but it seems promising.

https://www.jetbrains.com/air/

Maybe something like delta? This is still pretty new from the folks that make Zed, but looks promising and would address some of the things you mention https://delta.dev/

Sublime was/is still the best, unfortunately had to finally abandon it due to lack of first-class agent support. Hard to find something that emphasizes core text editing first and that doesn't constantly have some new update to apply on start that may break or change something.

Same. I feel like JetBrains has an advantage here, so I'm hoping they're working on something compelling. The traditional IDE setup is quickly dying.

I'm usually working between VSCode and Codex/Claude Code at the same time, but find myself mostly in latter these days.

It feels like JB is trying that, but it hasn't materialized in a way I understand yet; they have a handful of AI tools, and I don't fully understand them at this point, nor how they integrate and what roles they fill. (June, Air, AI asssistant, AI autocomplete)

Cursor has support for work trees, parallel chats, will walk you through diffs line by line. This is what I primarily use for the walking through diffs feature. If I need something to just throw over the wall, I fire up claude.

> most of my work is done on mobile

Can anything serious/complex be done on mobile? I'm genuinely curious. It's seems bizzare in the context of IDE and tooling discussion.