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Comment by smlacy | Hacker News Reader

Because integrating directly with very large varities of editors & environments is actually kind of hard? Everyone has their own favorite development environment, and by pulling the LLM agents into a separate area (i.e. a terminal app) then you can quickly get to "works in all environments". Additionally, this also implies "works with no dev environment at all". For example, vibe coding a simple HTML only webpage. All you need is terminal+browser.

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All of the IDEs already have the AI integrations, so there's no work to do. It's not like you don't have to do the equivalent work for a TUI as an IDE for integration of a new model, it's the same config for that task.

> works with no dev environment at all

The terminal is a dev environment, my IDE has it built in. Copilot can read both the terminal and the files in my project, it even opens them and shows me the diff as it changes them. No need to switch context between where I normally code and some AI tool. These TUIs feel like the terminal version of the webapp, where I have to go back and forth between interfaces.

The words "the AI integrations" are doing some weird work there, right? Agents all have opinionated structure, which changes how effective they are at working on different kinds of problems.

By AI (model) integrations, it's mostly pointing at a URL and what name the API keys are under in ENV. Everyone has pretty much adopted MCP for agents at this point, so also very standardized integration there too

MCP is a pretty minor detail relative to all the other design decisions that go into an agent? A serious agent is not literally just glue between programs and an upstream LLM.

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