> The biggest players in AI code today are full IDEs, not just extensions,

Claude Code (neither IDE nor extension) is rapidly gaining ground, it's biggest current limitation being cost, which is likely to get resolved sooner rather than later (Gemini Code anyone?). You're right about the right now, but with the pace at which things are moving, the trends are honestly more relevant than the status quo.

> Claude Code (neither IDE nor extension) is rapidly gaining ground

What makes you say that? From what I’m observing it doesn’t seem to be talked much about at all.

Claude Code's announcement earned 2k+ point on HN when it launched (7th most popular HN submission this year).

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=claude+code

Together with 3.7 Sonnet. And the claim was that it is rapidly gaining ground, not that it sparked initial interest. I still don’t see much proof of adoption. This is actually the first I’ve heard about anyone actually actively using it since its launch.

>This is actually the first I’ve heard about anyone actually actively using it

I've been reaching for Claude Code first for the last couple weeks. They had offered me a $40 credit after I tried it and didn't really use it, maybe 6 weeks ago, but since I've been using it a lot. I've spent that credit and another $30, and it's REALLY good. One thing I like about Claude Code is you can "/init" and it will create a "CLAUDE.md" that saves off it's understanding of the code, and then you can modify it to give it some working knowledge.

I've also tried Codex with OpenAI and o4-mini, and it works very well too, though I have had it crash on me which claude has not.

I did try Codex with Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview, but it is really weird. It seems to not be able to do any editing, it'll say "You need to make these edits to this file (and describe high level fixes) and then come back when you're done and I'll tell you the edits to do to this other file." So that integration doesn't seem to be complete. I had high hopes because of the reviews of the new 2.5 Pro.

I also tried some claude-like use in the AI panel in Zed yesterday, and made a lot of good progress, it seemed to work pretty well, but then at some point it zeroed out a couple files. I think I might have reached a token limit, it was saying "110K out of 200K" but then something else said "120K" and I wonder if that confused it. With Codex you can compact the history, I didn't see that in Zed. Then at some point my Zed switched from editing to needing me to accept every change. I used nearly the entire trial Zed allowance yesterday asking it to impelement a Galaga-inspired game, with varying success.

Spending too much time on HN and other spaces (including offline) where people talk about what they're doing. Making LLM-based things has also been my job since pretty much the original release of GPT3.5 which kicked off the whole industry, so I have an excuse.

The big giveaway is that everyone who has tried it agrees that it's clearly the best agentic coding tool out there. The very few who change back to whatever they were using before (whether IDE fork, extension or terminal agent), do so because of the costs.

Relevant post on the front page right now: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code [0]. The comment section supports the above as well.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43931409

I personally tried it and I felt it way more confusing to use compared to using Cursor with Claude 3.7 Sonnet. The CLI interface seems to me more to lend itself for «vibe coding» where you actually never work and look with the actual code. That is why I think Cursor and IDEs are more popular than CLI only tools.

Just want to share our thinking on terminal-based tools!

We think in 1-2 years people will write code at a systems level, not a function level, and it's not clear to us that you can do that with text. Text-based tools like Claude Code work in our text-based-code systems today, but I think describing algorithms to a computer in the future might involve more diagrams, and terminal will not be ideal. That's our reasoning against building a tool in the terminal, but it clearly works well today, and is the simplest way for the labs to train/run terminal tool-use agents.

Diagrams are great at providing a simplified view of things but they suck ass when it comes to providing details.

There's a reason why fully creating systems from them died 20 years ago - and it wasn't just because the code gen failed. Finding a bug in your spec when its a mess of arrows and connections can be nigh impossible.

Go image search "complex unreal blueprint".

This is completely true, and it's a really common objection.

I don't imagine people will want to fully visualize codebases in a giant unified diagram, but I find it hard to imagine that we won't have digests and overviews that at least stray from plaintext in some way.

I think there are a lot of unexplored ways of using AI to create an intelligent overview of a repo and its data structures, or a React project and its components and state, etc.

Terminals aren't too far away from evolving [0] beyond UTF-8 characters. Therefore I suspect IDEs and CLIs will continue their turf wars as always.

> hard to imagine that we won't have digests and overviews

100% agreed here.

Disclosure: I'm the author of the project below.

[0] https://terminal.click

FYI, this is currently a dead link - wasn't sure if typo, so googled and confirmed, looks like you're down at the moment. Hopefully not a painful fix on a Sunday.

> I think there are a lot of unexplored ways of using AI to create an intelligent overview of a repo and its data structures, or a React project and its components and state, etc.

Sounds exactly like what DeepWiki is doing from the Devin AI Agent guys: https://deepwiki.com

You have lost all connection to reality.

Hey by the way I hear all communication between people is going to shift to pictograms soon. You know -- emoji and hieroglyphs. Text just isn't ideal, you know

Every system can be translated can be translated to text though. If there is one thing LLMs have essentially always been good at, it is processing written language.

I don't know Claude Code, so if it's "neither IDE nor extension", what is it?

It's a CLI tool

I think it'd be worthwhile to call out in a FAQ/comparison table specifically how something like an "AI powered IDE" such as Cursor/Void differs from just using an IDE + a full-featured agentic plugin (VS Codium + Cline).

I agree, having used Cline I am not sure what advantages this would offer, but I would like to know (beyond things like “it’s got an open source ide” - Cline has those too specifically because I can use it in my open source ide)

The versioning and git branching sounds really neat, I think! Can you say more about that? Curious if you've looked at/are considering using Jujutsu/JJ[0] in addition or instead of git for this, I've played with it some, but been considering trying it more with new AI coding stuff, it feels like it could be a more natural fit than actually creating explicit commits for every change, while still tracking them all? Just a thought!

[0]https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj

Interesting, thanks for sharing! We planned on spinning up a new Git branch and shallow Git clone (or possibly worktree/something more optimized) for each agent, and also adding a small auto-merge-with-LLM flow, although something more granular like this might feel better. If we don't use a versioning tool like JJ at first (may just use Git for simplicity at first), we will certainly consider it later on, or might end up building our own.

I agree the branching sounds super cool!

If you're open to something CLI-based, my project Plandex[1] offers git-based branching (and granular versioning) for AI coding. It also has a sandbox (also built on git) that keeps cumulative changes separate from project files until they're ready to apply.

1 - https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex

I think it's worth mentioning that the Theia IDE is a fully open source VS Code-compatible IDE (not a fork of VS Code) that's actively adding AI features with a focus on transparency and hackability.

We considered Theia, and even building our own IDE, but obviously VSCode is just the most popular. Theia might be a good play if Microsoft gets more aggressive about VSCode forks, although it's not clear to us that people will be spending their time writing code in 1-2 years. Chances are definitely not 0 that we end up moving away from VSCode as things progress.

It's the most popular because the tech is decades old. You're all rushing to copy obsolete technology. Now we have 10 copies of an obsolete technology.

We used to know better

I mean I guess I should thank the 10 teams who forked VSCode for proving beyond all reasonable doubt that VSCode is architecturally obsolete. I was already trying to make that argument, but the 10 forks do it so much better.

Isn't continue.dev also open source and not using 'their backend' when sending stuff? I didn't use it in a while, but I know it had support for llama, local models for tab completions, etc.

Continue is doing great work, but they're an extension (plugin)!

What’s wrong with a plugin? I don’t see the benefit of an IDE over a plugin.

The extensions API lets you control the sidebar, but you basically don't have control over anything in the editor. We wouldn't have been able to build our inline edit feature, or our navigation UI if we were an extension.

Continue.dev is an extension and it does inline edits just fine in VS Code and IntelliJ.

Big fan of Continue btw! There's a small difference in how we handle inline edits - if you've used inline edits in Cursor/Windsurf/Void you'll notice that a box appears above the text you are selecting, and you can type inside of it. This isn't possible with VS Code extensions alone (you _have_ to type into the sidebar).

Is inline edits the same as diff edits? In that case I think Cline and Roo can do it as well.

If I understand your question correctly - Cline and Roo both display diffs by using built-in VS Code components, while Cursor/Windsurf/Void have built their own custom UI to display diffs. Very small detail, and just a matter of preference.

It's about whether the tool can edit just a few lines of the file, or whether it needs to stream the whole file every time - in effect, editing the whole file even though the end result may differ by just a few lines.

I think editing just a part of the file is what Roo calls diff editing, and I'm asking if this is what the person above means by line edits.

So this is closer to Zed than Cursor/Windsurf/Continue, right?

edit: ahh just saw that it is also a fork of VS Code, so it is indeed OSS Cursor

Yep, Void is a VSCode fork, but we're definitely not wed to VSCode! Building our own IDE/browser-port is not out of the picture. We'll have to see where the next iteration of tool-use agents takes us, but we strongly feel writing typescript/rust/react is not the endgame when describing algorithms to a computer, and a text-based editor might not be ideal in 10 years, or even 2.

> and there is no open source full IDE alternative (besides Void).

And Zed: https://zed.dev

Yesterday on the front page of HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43912844

And Emacs, also mentioned in that thread (by me, but still).

this joke could not have been more perfectly set up if it were staged. thanks for the guffaw.

I should have been more careful with my wording - I was talking about major VS Code-based IDEs as alternatives. Zed is very impressive, and we've been following them since before Void's launch!

openAI chose to acquire windsurf for 3B instead of building something like Void, very curious decision. awesome project, will be closely following this

>> The biggest players in AI code today are full IDEs, not just extensions

Are you sure? I have some expertise with my IDE, some other extension which solve problems for me, a wide range of them, I've learnt shortcuts, troubleshooting, where and who ask for help, but now you're telling me that I am better off leaving all that behind, and it's better for me? ;o

Maybe I live in a bubble, but it's surprising to me that nobody mentions Jetbrains in all these discussions. Which in my professional working experience are the only IDEs anyone uses :shrug:

I’m not sure I’ve met a Jetbrains user in projects I’ve worked on. It’s a paid product so just has a small userbase.

Pycharm is extremely popular in the data science world. The Community Edition is free and has 99% of the features most people need. Even when developing with Cursor, I find myself going back to Pycharm just to use the debugger, which I greatly prefer to the debugger used in these VS Code forks.

Lately I’ve only tried clion, which has no free version. Personally it didn’t function as well as vscode for C++.

You may have missed it but they did release a free version of clion recently (for personal use). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43914705

Funny enough, I know a lot of people who work at JetBrains, but only a few end-users.

Their use base is completely different. And we’re both in a bubble, I reckon. IntelliJ people also only know a few VSCode users!

Here are some numbers on their user base in real number and dollar amounts: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/annualreport-2024/

Their tools are wildly popular in many spaces. It isn't for everyone though. It's totally believable in your circle no one uses their tools, but it isn't niche.