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Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

> I however, run an IDE and can run a simple refactoring tool to add a parameter to a function, I can “follow symbol” to see where something is defined, I can click and get all usages of a function shown at a glance, etc etc

I am so surprised that all of the AI tooling mostly revolves around VSC or its forks and that JetBrains seem to not really have done anything revolutionary in the space.

With how good their refactoring and code inspection tools are, you’d really think they’d pass of that context information to AI models and that they’d be leaps and bounds ahead.

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Recently, all these agents can talk LSP (language server protocol) so it should get better soon. That said, yeah they don't seem to default to use `ripgrep` when that is clearly better than `grep`

What you really want is ast-grep[1].

Ripgrep is much faster than grep. But the result is not more concise and tokens are wasted.

I think codex uses ast-grep by default, if installed; Claude has to be instructed?

[1] https://ast-grep.github.io/

Codex likes to use ripgrep.

Claudes search tool uses Ripgrep , which is embedded in Claude.

Are you? I'm not surprised at all, considering that the biggest investment juggernaut in AI is also the author of VSC. I wonder what the connection is? ;)

Well, Google also has their own AIs and lots of money to throw around.

Unfortunately the have abysmal design sense for TUI and an inability to recognize the good feature requests they are getting

And yet contrary to Microsoft and Apple, they outsource most of their main development tools.

Go and Dart hardly get the love across their SDKs as Objective-C, Swift, C#, VB get on their owners.

Same with IDE tooling, fully dependant on JetBrains and Microsoft.

Agreed - this seems like a no brainer, surely this is something that is being worked on.

Jetbrains is trying but I feel like they're very very behind in the space

Claude and other LLMs can be used through JetBrains, and the IDE provides a significantly better experience than VS Code in my opinion.

I haven't seen JetBrains as 'great'. I think they have a strong marketing team that gets into universities and potentially astroturfs on the internet, but I have always found better tools for every language. Although, I can't remember what I ended up choosing for PHP.

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