Overall I agree with everything you’ve said and I also use ChatGPT and Claude directly. The issue is that:

Good at integrating AI into a text editor != Good at building an IDE.

I worry about the ability for some of these VSCode forks to actually maintain a fork and again, I greatly prefer the power of IDEA. I’ll switch if it becomes necessary, but right now the lack of deep AI integration is not compelling enough to switch since I still have ways of using AI directly (and I have Copilot).

I'm guessing using AI will fundamentally change how IDE even works. Maybe everything IDE's offer right now is not needed when you have a copilot you tell what to do.

I'm a long term vim user. I find all the IDE stuff distracting and noisy. With AI makes it even more noisy. I'm guessing the new generation will just be better at using it. Similar to how we got good at "googling stuff".

My coworkers do just fine with vim.

"past performance is not indicative of future results"

Is it not though? It's not a guarantee but definitely an indication.

Not really. Only thing you can guarantee is things change.

Let’s just throw away all past experience then?

It’s a mistake to assume that there will be 100% correlation between the past and future, but it’s probably as bad of a mistake to assume 0% correlation. (Obviously dependant on exactly what you are looking at).

0% maybe not. But it's the outliers and the didn't see that comings that kill ya. Sometimes literally.

So while the odds at the extremes are low, they cannot be ignored.

No one can predict the future. But those that assume tomorrow will be like today are - per history - going to be fatally wrong eventually.

So the choices are 100% or 0%?

That’s my point – they are not. Your previous comment implied to me a belief that any attempt to draw inference from past events was doomed to failure!

Each circumstance is different. Sometimes the past is a good guide to the future – even for the notoriously unpredictable British weather apparently you can get a seventy percent success rate (by some measure) by predicting that tomorrows weather will be the same as todays. Sometimes it is not - the history of an ideal roulette wheel should offer no insights into future numbers.

The key is of course to act in accordance with the probability, risk and reward.

I did not speak with certainty. Everything I said is guess and opinion.

vim is the "just put your money in an index fund" of text editors

Technology also moves into dead ends. Not every change is progress. You can only tell a posteriori which paths were fruitful and which were not.

Everything ends. Even things you used for a long time.

Almost every program I've used 20 years ago still available today. I think that I switched from Eclipse to Idea like 15 years ago, but Eclipse is still rocking. IT really frozen in 1990s. OS didn't change at all, they just switch fancy colors and border radius every few years. Software is the same, they just add more annoying bugs and useless features, but nothing really changes. I'm still using the same unix shell and unix tools I've used 20 years ago, I'm still greping and seding files around.

Stone tablets and chisel technically still available also.

Falling behind what?

If I knew answer to that question I wouldn't be falling behind

That's cool

So you're just out here wasting my time

See you

This is exactly what OpenAI and other want you to believe. "OH NO, I need to use LLMs for coding otherwise I will fall behind". No, no. Most of what makes a good software engineer cannot be replaced by LLMs. A good software engineer has a deep understanding of the problem space, works on the right things, and elevates their team members by coaching, helping etc. It's not about how fast you type your code.

There's still time to find out if what you say is true

I refuse to believe there were ever editors before vim.

Vim has been around since the Stone Age.

Jokes aside, I don’t really see why ai tools need new editors vs plugins EXCEPT that they don’t want to have to compete with Microsoft’s first party AI offerings in vscode.

It’s just a strategy for lock-in.

An exception may be like zed, which provides a lot of features besides AI integration which require a new editor.

They probably said the same thing when someone created vim, or vi.

Sorry, I’m not understanding what you mean.

Vi and vim were never products sold for a profit.

Who was saying what? And what were they saying?

EDIT: ah I think I understand now.

The thing is, I don’t see any advantage to having AI built into the editor vs having a plug-in. Aider.vim is pretty great, for example.

The only reason to have a dedicated editor is a retention/lock in tactic.

Every time there's a new editor, or anything else, people complain why we need another one. Sometimes that new thing is innovative.

Sure, I just don’t see what an AI first editor would have over vscode, vim, or whatever already exists + an extension.

The editor handles the human to text file interface, handling key inputs, rendering, managing LSPs, providing hooks to plugins, etc. AI coding assistants kind of sits next to sits it just handles generating text.

It’s why many of these editors just fork vscode. All the hard work is already done, they just add lock in as far as I can tell.

Again, zed is an exception in this pack bc of its CRDT and cooperative features. Those are not things you can easily add on to an existing editor.