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Comment by cynicalpeace | Hacker News Reader

Any IDE that isn't "AI first" is going to have a hard time from here on out. Cursor is beginning to eat the world much like VSCode did.

I'm sure there are some here on HN that will say "nah, I prefer the old fashioned way" but you will be decidedly in the minority very fast.

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Nah; an IDE / editor needs to be a solid, pluggable and performant core first and foremost, so that any addons like AI shenanigans are opt-in and swappable. While AI isn't new, AI-powered code assist is and with that in mind we're only at the beginning.

Consider LSP, where language developers can now publish a single tool for language specific utilities, where before every editor needed to add support for languages separately. Again, pluggability.

We actually are in agreement, especially re pluggability.

Whether it's an extension or "AI first", the impact of AI on IDE's will be massive and an IDE that doesn't do it well will be barely used.

You’re actually not in agreement, because “AI first” would imply it being a core feature of the IDE/Editor, something like Zed, whereas a plugin would imply that I can ignore it and it not being a core part of said IDE/Editor.

lol I agree with every part of what they said except "Nah".

Interesting to be told what I do and do not agree with.

I guess I'm an old grump then. I don't want air first development. It should be an extension. Why would an editor need to have air baked in when things like language support is an extension?

It could be an extension, but its going to be so important that the IDE with the best AI support will be the most popular. Presumably that IDE won't relegate it to extension class citizenship. It will be most of the product.

Even now, I've built a ramen profitable side project mostly by sipping my coffee and approving Cursor's suggestions. 10x faster at least.

Way more productivity gains than even language support.

as an extension it already exists, nothing new in that front.

I doubt that if Stackoverflow or Jetbrains surveys included a question about if people just heard about cursor that you will get more than 50%. Let alone people actually using it and ditching VSCode.

I said "beginning"

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