alt Hacker NewsI think they are trying new things even with "nobody writes code anymore" in mind. Their IDEs are now MCP servers for agents to reason about the code. Imagine your agent will stop wasting tokens using grep to find symbol usages if he can just ask IDE where it is used. They are not the best option for vibecoders right now but who knows what will happen in 1 year.
Integration with other developer tools, code reviews etc. are better than ever. Ideavim is probably the best vim plugin and it gets new features every month. They are also investing a lot in the AI.
I would bet they will survive just fine unless we would write software in slack only using emoji :-)
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Not using tooling (or not creating one) for repeating tasks and trying to one shot everything with latest frontier model is a difference between the bill for AI usage being 10 Eur or 10000 Eur
And their MCP servers and tools are great! But I wish they’d remember that some of us also actually code in the IDE, because human usage quality of their IDEs has been getting worse in that time…
While I "vibe code" more and more these days, an IDE that still does code highlighting, I can use it to look up functions source and so on, it is very useful to be able to figure out what the LLM did.
And yes, there are people who use vim in a screen session, but I don't fit into that category. I like my GoLand IDE.
And while there are a ton of IDEs out there, I use what I'm used to.
Imagine your agent will stop wasting tokens using grep to find symbol usages if he can just ask IDE where it is used. They are not the best option for vibecoders right now but who knows what will happen in 1 year.
Can't agents just use a language server? There are already a bunch of projects that provide this, e.g.: https://www.agent-lsp.com/
Doesn't seem like a huge differentiator anymore?
I don't really know much about their current users, but from a business perspective, post-tokenmaxxing and them having an IDE, it seems like the most efficient environment for having a human in the loop is something they could tackle?