Microsoft has had a very long reputation (for good reason) for having good developer tooling, even if Windows was not particularly developer friendly...

For me, the things that made Jebteains great just don’t matter anymore.

My guess is that people aren't abandoning their IDEs. Their market is probably growing. I suspect they're burning money on subsidized inference, just like everybody else.

I would like to see one more ide-integrated, like I think running commands like ‘grep’ with the shell is really for the birds (creates a risk that some other command line might be run, the wrong files might be accessed, all that) and rather there should be a specialized toolbox.

[1] … I reject vibe coding. Token costs be damned but I always like to have a talk before it starts like “I think…, maybe you should…, does this make sense?, do you have any questions for me before you start?” and later “what are you doing in the code in the selection?”

It is alright to get an LLM review on code I write myself, but getting extra tokens is expensive, and it was not clear if I could configure it to use one of the API keys I have from GLM, MiMo, etc.

I tried Air as well. It was alright, but I found it a bit more cumbersome to use then Pi. I tried configuring Pi to be accessed though ACP, but it felt like going through a hoop to have a worse experience. Then again, I am not someone that manages multiple agents in parallel, at most I have one agent implementing something in a different repository while I am doing my own things.

Air could maybe be useful for me if I could plug in the LLMs I actually use directly, it is too tied to ChatGPT, Claude, etc.

I still use Visual Studio in my day job, where Claude's output while VERY helpful, requires my ownership of everything, meaning I am inspecting every single line it changes. If a change is bigger than I think it should, I kill it before I commit.

I know I don't HAVE to use an IDE for that, but if the change is small enough, I am faster than asking Claude to understand the subtext behind my personal context of the product, and the IDE is supremely helpful for making a quick change across a handful of files.

Now it's Claude Code and ever so occasionally Codex.

I never do work in IDEs by hand anymore. I stopped writing code entirely in February and I will likely never write code again unless my internet dies.

I need a JetBrains-level AST navigator that focuses on high level code navigation and understanding, and moreover on code and architectural review. I need to quickly scan diffs and quickly see architecture at a glance.

Of course even that too many eventually fall away.

I rarely open RustRover these days. I could never have predicted that.

Wonder what the "something big" could be that companies are throwing money into in 2026.

I'm usually working between VSCode and Codex/Claude Code at the same time, but find myself mostly in latter these days.

https://www.jetbrains.com/air/

Any leverage that claude could benefit from LSPs or language/AST MCPs is undone by that tooling not being able to keep up or stay fresh, so the IDE just "runs hot" for no purpose.

Which means I'm incentivised to close my IDE while claude is working, and now I've got used to not looking at the code.

Like you, I really want a system that works better. I want claude to search and edit through better tooling, it would be faster, more accurate, and should in theory be able to leverage compilers to apply edits better and more accurately.

I don't want claude wasting an awful lot of time grepping for things that a compiler cache can answer, but if that compiler cache can't keep up then it's actively harmful.

I'm sure there must be a better way, there must be a way to have smarter more change-aware cache invalidation, and smarter more cache-aware claude tool use, but so far none has happened.

Long term I'm sure the pairing will emerge, but unfortunately I don't think that's going to come from the IDE vendor side, it'll have to come out of some harness research lab, where Anthropic or a competitor finds a way to reliably leverage this stuff for a speed and accuracy boost.

It's completely bonkers to me that an LLM can almost "natively" read profiler output, but doing so involves vast amounts of text and context ingestion, when there are real tools sitting there that it ignores in preference for either reading vast amounts or iffy python one-shot scripts to parse stuff.

It only fits a hands-on, merely AI-assisted development approach, on one feature at a time, that is not typically productive compared to agentic development.

You might disagree, but you'll find that the proponents of the hands-on approach are losing ground every month as AI gets better at working autonomously.

I'm paid to create a product. If Claude does so without me having to look at the code, then that's what I'm being paid to do.