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Comment by sunaurus | Hacker News Reader

I'm realizing I am a minority, but my IDE is becoming MORE valuable to me, not less, with LLMs.

The volume of code is only increasing. Problems that used to be solved with a few lines (or even removing lines) are now solved with changes across 10 different files.

My IDE is invaluable for me when trying to navigate this stuff. I am completely convinced that people reviewing LLM code only via PR diffs are consistently missing massive systemic issues. You *need* to review changes in context of the surrounding code.

And doing this without an IDE is just making your life harder for no reason.

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JetBrainer here. I can attest that you are a primary target for Air for IDEs.

We have put a lot of thought into how we can add value for the workflow you just described. Here's the way I think about it: FSD for a car. Can you imagine trying to sell a car without a steering wheel? I still want to code, I still want the deterministic side, even in cases where I'm letting the machine do the work.

I wanted to try Air, as it seems to have interesting ideas for working collaboratively with LLMs.

But the choice of AI providers was very limited, and I found no ways to add the ones I use (the only options for providers were Anthropic, OpenAI and Google).

Any plans of opening up for more providers?

With ACP, it allows for any provider you choose.

Cool, I'll try this today.

I would really like Air to be closer to an agent / terminal multiplexer like CMUX / WMUX: I would for example like to be able to basically type "claude" or "codex" to launch my harness with the CLI args I need. The fact this requires dedicated API keys from the LLM providers makes it a no go at both home and work.

Likewise.

Unless you are blindly vibe coding everything without an IDE to help navigate what is being generated to review the output, working would be hellish.

And if you are blindly vibe coding everything, I am just glad I don't have to work with you. While LLMs mostly speed me up, they make serious mistakes often enough that a review is necessary.

So you're using the IDE for review? The main features you need are around simple things like reading files, tracking git changes, things like that?

That's a small subset of the functionality you would need if you're actually authoring code. So the IDE maybe be more valuable, but the feature set you need is actually much smaller and can probably be redesigned given your narrow workflow.

Is this accurate?

Sure, but my IDE does these simple things very well.

Just some important things off the top of my head that I use daily:

* Instantly jumping between definitions and usages

* Folding and unfolding code blocks

* Quick overview of structures in files

* Database access, so I can browse the data and the code at the same time

Also, sometimes I just want to quickly refactor/rename some variable across all its usages or whatever. It's just quicker to do it in the IDE with a simple keyboard shortcut, rather than prompting an agent "rename oldName to newName".

I'd agree with this. I've been working with Claude on an app. I wanted to increase the size of one element in the UI. I could have asked Claude to do it, but I wanted to understand the application, as well as it kinda seemed like a waste of time and tokens.

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