The IDE Is Dead. Long Live the ADE | Hacker News Reader

The IDE Is Dead. Long Live the ADE

lanes.sh

15 pointss-xyz35 comments

I feel like I'm starting to have an allergic reaction to the AI writing style. I can no longer unsee it, albeit I can't exactly pinpoint what about the text triggers this guttal reaction.

It's absolutely disgusting and I feel almost offended that I am supposed to spend time reading something that the author clearly hasn't even spent time writing.

I am okay with using AI or software to proofread and improve a piece of writing but this one is clearly fully written by AI, as is evident with the short sentences and the awkward writing style -- no human actually writes or talks like that.

Because it's a machine pretending to have experiences. It uses abstract phrasing by default in a way that people don't. So the output feels uncanny. Starting to see this all over reddit comments too. I don't know what the point of not writing your own comments is, other than spam.

We are really reaching a point where the internet is becoming so unbearable. People that don't write their comments often want to farm engagment or just wanna sound smart. Either way, the thirst is disgusting to me.

>I don't know what the point of not writing your own comments is, other than spam.

I think it will reach to the point of "dogfooding".

Those who's not crafting their own comments will be treated as those who's not using their written software.

I hear you, its the same for me tbh, BUT I strongly stand behind the content written. Writing skills are degrading.

How does the disclaimer fit into this?

> This article was written with the help of AI

At this point someone's low quality writing is more compelling than all these people who can't be bothered to express themselves. Like I could write this blog post in 10 seconds:

I realized recently that AI agents are so good that we don't need to read code anymore. I told my team to uninstall all their IDEs as an experiment. A few weeks later they agreed with me. Lanes is a tool that enables this new coding paradigm. I'd love it if you checked it out.

Easy.

I've become conditioned to go catatonic when I see a sentence structured like "It's not X (that is Y), it's Z"

It's all kinds of patterns. What stood out in this one is that almost all subheadings start with "The".

I notice that I'm even changing my writing style the moment I feel like I'm writing how an AI might write. Doesn't feel good either.

> I feel like I'm starting to have an allergic reaction to the AI

I think what you're allergic to is marketing hyperbole-speak. That's kind of the default mode many of the models write in. I have my guesses for why that is, but I also have a belief that it's part of their training. Unless you explicitly ask for some other style, it's what you get.

> You're spending more time orchestrating than creating.

Orchestration is a form of creating. I've lead teams of programmers; while it is different than orchestrating AI, programmers typically require less hand-holding, it is not so different in how it is a form of delegating effort to achieve your creative goals.

> The agents aren't the problem. Your brain is.

If anything, my worry is that relying too heavily on agents will cause my knowledge to be forgotten and my skills to atrophy. I don't particularly want to stop programming so much as it is that I want to develop software as part of a team. That team now includes some AI agents, as well as humans.

The need to write code isn't going anywhere. I expect that in the very long term it will retain value, as developing expert level programming ability will be a difficult challenge when so much can be accomplished with little to no such ability.

>> I recently told all my engineers to delete their IDEs. PyCharm, VS Code, Cursor. All of them.

I’m all in on AI assisted development but this is ridiculous.

There’s so many self evident reasons to need an IDE as a developer.

Presumably the unidentified author is selling something that benefits from such a stance.

Yes. And then after you throw all your tools away you should buy my software.

I’d resign on the spot if my team lead told me to delete all IDEs and that coding is solved.

If all coding is solved, what do they need you for? You'd be laid off before you could quit if that was the case.

Exactly, if coding is solved, why do they have a team? I'm sure doing all their engineering through an openclaw instance is totally a good idea, right?

Nah, quiet quit. Orchestrate the agents to the degree necessary to keep your job, and no more. Use the free time to read a book.

Exactly, our gen's gold rush.

I do all my dev in CC now.

Only occasionally review with an editor.

CC is great at many things but one area it is still not great at is making GUI interactions look and work properly. Literally likely because it can neither see the GUI (without manual screenshot intervention) nor can it see it change over time. So if for example a progress indication is not working correctly, it will totally miss stuff like that.

Yeah I can see that. How many Claude or Codex terminal sessions do you run in parallel?

About 4?

I find it's often faster for me to finish the final 20% myself than to talk the agent into doing it for me; because too often the agent will start to eat its own tail, and spend far too long completing something that I find obvious.

Yes, and English/natural language is not necessarily more concise than programming languages, if you need to describe something precisely.

For example, I was recently trying to get an agent to debug something which was difficult to debug because it ran in an exotic context, where debuggers and logging and printf couldn't easily reach. The agent kept coming up with more and more elaborate and smart-sounding theories and debugging strategies, but nothing worked. I stupidly kept going with this for like 20 minutes, until finally I just went into an IDE, did a simple "comment bisection" where I commented stuff out until I found the line that was breaking, and found and fixed the problem in five minutes. So I solved it by typing code. The code I typed: "//" (in about six places). I could probably have gotten the agent to do the same thing but would have actually literally had to type more to explain to the agent what I wanted. In fact it took me longer to write this comment describing what I did here than it did to just do it.

I’m frankly surprised it hasn’t been flagged to hell yet.

Flagged just now. Feels like the early days of Stackoverflow :)

ADE ? This is when I know we are running out of acronyms :)

ADE was the "Advanced Development Environment" that you could get in the 80s for the Wang VS System. ADE started suffering from some minor bitrot, so on the VS I wrote my own I called DE, Development Environment.

There was a decent chance DE would have been bundled with Wangs VS on AIX Environment that was being built in R&D, but the company went Chapter 11 and that project was cancelled :(

So cool! What alternative acronym do you propose?

None, that project is long dead, I just find it interesting we seems to have run out of acronyms, especially 3 letter ones.

Like domain names :)

Alexa,

Play despacito

Wait, I thought it was the 2nd of April today?

> I recently told all my engineers to delete their IDEs

Yeah if I ever have to hear this bullshit, I’m out

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