I bet a lot of the grumbling about coding agents is really about losing out on the joy of moving quickly through code via a deeply learned text editor. I’m feeling it too, but I’m not so great at vim that my whole coding identity is wrapped up in it.

As goes the complaint about the decline of manual transmissions, even in sports cars, so goes the decline of emacs/vi/etc. “No connection”, “not enough focus”. Not wrong, but the toothpaste is out of the tube here.

That said, there’s a legitimate complaint to make here about software slowing down! We were almost getting to the point that raw latency was a virtue in software. And then we got uncanny, but not fast, intelligence. 🤷

It strikes me that my text editor is now, effectively, a quasi-natural language interface onto bulk and sometimes quite intelligent text operations. Well, sometimes entirely not what I want. But still, bulk and natural language.

Lately, I try Cursor every several weeks. Mostly to see if the grass is greener. But it’s not for me. Jetbrains-flavored tools are more holistic and more right for me. Regardless of the grass.

I think Cursor is an intriguing team and a good product. The best version of VS Code you could possibly use, the easiest possible onramp to coding with agents. Nonetheless, I want to be using Zed for everything. However, I think the writing is on the wall for pure, even principled, text editors. Typing in code is no longer the bottleneck. Memorizing keystroke optimizations is doubling down on a sunk cost.

Looking at the functionality of an integrated environment like RubyMine or PyCharm, I think the value of its git integration has gone up by a lot. This is essentially why I went back to PyCharm from Cursor. I can’t be bothered with simplistic, non-excellent git interfaces. (I wonder if Sublime Merge sales will start to exceed Sublime Text sales. 🤔)

VS Code, and Cursor by literal extension, seem like the keybindings were invented by 3 different people ten years apart. Which they probably were, literally. I can’t abide this.

The other thing that brought me back to PyCharm is browsing/discovering data alongside code alongside revision changes. It stands to reason that if writing code is less critical in the future, understanding the data will grow in importance. Even better, understanding your code and data in the same tool, with sensible affordances to jump between the two. This is why I’m betting on IDEs gaining ground.

Let’s not mention the part where now we’re paying for code, from our new-found editors, by the line. I’m surprised I’m not more salty about this.😬

The future of code is understanding the whole system, not constructing each part in exquisite detail. The IDE of the future probably looks more like code review alongside a debugger, than a code editor with version control and data management attached as sidecars. A bunch of Slacks and GitHubs mashed together.