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I was surprised people were so willing to jump to closed source IDEs just for access to coding agents. The trade-off you pay for tight integration between the I
by riskassessment 4mo ago
I was surprised people were so willing to jump to closed source IDEs just for access to coding agents. The trade-off you pay for tight integration between the IDE and the coding agent is lock-in because the barrier to switching IDEs is nontrivial.
Your coding environment stands a lower chance of disruption when you use an open source IDE with a CLI agent. Yes it's slightly annoying to separate the agent from the IDE but the benefit is that it's much easier to switch between Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI (now antigravity CLI), etc which means you can more easily benefit from pricing and coding performance differences which seem to change monthly.
- KeplerBoy 4mo agoAntigravity is just a vs code (more correctly: codeium) skin with Google telemetry and agent Integration. You can switch back to Microsoft's or cursor's flavor in minutes.
- Mond_ 4mo agoIt isn't anymore, though, that's kind of the whole point of the article.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Semaphor 4mo agoFwiw, the (mostly) closed source jetbrains IDEs support multiple models with their coding agents, byok, and using different agents like Claude Code via ACP
- riskassessment 4mo agoFair, the important distinction is agent-agnostic rather than open-source. There are other risks to using a closed source editor but those are mostly orthogonal to this discussion.
- kllrnohj 4mo agoClosed source IDEs are if anything the norm: Visual Studio, Android Studio, XCode, IntelliJ, CLion, PyCharm, etc... Even in the "fancy text editor" category things like Sublime were always popular enough.
- coder543 4mo agoClosed source? IntelliJ: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community PyCharm: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/tree/master/python#intellij-platform-open-source-repository-pycharm https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/tree/master/... Android Studio: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/adt/idea/+/refs/heads/mirror-goog-studio-master-dev#android-studio https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/adt/idea/+/r... Yes, they might offer extended proprietary editions/plugins in addition, but the IDEs themselves are open source.
- orsorna 4mo agoNone of these are the "norm". The IDEs OC mentioned all have a much larger install base.
- lstodd 4mo agoDo all of those installed on my various machines for the express purpose of a last resort of building some obscure crap about once a couple years count? Because of course I have them installed.. somewhere. And of course I wouldn't imagine using that crap daily.
- StrLght 4mo ago[citation needed] IDEs made by JetBrains are huge. At this point, they're basically the standard option for several JVM languages.
- bigbuppo 4mo agoYou can't expect the average person on HN to admit to using a JVM-based language. That would mean they write boring business software rather than cool ad surveillance tech.
- jeromegv 4mo agoThe funny part is that Gemini-Cli is open-source, and now they are getting rid of it for Antigravity CLI.. which is not open-source. Fun.
- sourya4 4mo agoamen!! this is why i've built all of my setup using a dotfiles-like approach with the explicit intention of always being agent/model-agnostic: https://github.com/ma08/botfiles https://github.com/ma08/botfiles the key insight is that if you own the context layer and keep your skills, hooks etc. portable enough, it's actually very easy to swtich agents at will (even mid-task)
- eikenberry 4mo agoIf you care about keeping your development environment free from corporate lockin and control you should also avoid closed source CLIs and use open-weight models.
- shmel 4mo agoDo we still need an IDE though? I am very happy with Claude Code last 6 months. I can totally see why Google got rid of everything, but the dialog box. Perhaps it was stupid to do that without warning, but ultimately this is the future.
- RHSeeger 4mo agoI find this comment mind-boggling; in an honest confusion, not insulting way. I use Claude Code (and desktop) on a daily basis; but I can't even imagine doing anything complex without being able to see the code.
- 20k 4mo agoThere seems two kinds of developers 1. Developers that create the mess and don't have to deal with the consequences 2. Developers that fix the mess and have to deal with the consequences I've noticed that the former category is significantly more pro AI than the latter
- seanw444 4mo agoCan we stop calling it AI and making it sound cooler than it really is: a lossily-compressed text lookup DB?
- shmel 4mo agoI admit I look at the code less and less now. But when I do want that I just ask Claude to show me the code verbatim. It is almost always faster than click in IDE because it greps with insane speed. After all, when it's fully AI-generated it's sort of someone else's codebase from my perspective, I end up grepping through it the same way it does. Gradually I moved to asking questions about the code instead, something like "if X and Y, will Z still hold? did we not forget to check this?" I realized that this is what I am doing in my head when looking at the code. And Claude understands well enough what I mean and checks it. What I found mind-blowing though is that surprisingly often it says me something like "while looking this up for you I think found a potential bug, would you like me to quickly check it?" or "I noticed that actually when X and Y true, Z holds indeed, but I believe there is a rare situation (...) when we don't want Z because it makes zero sense, what do you think?"
- aplomb1026 4mo ago[flagged]
- martythemaniak 4mo ago> barrier to switching IDEs is nontrivial That was definitely true in the hand-crafted code era, but I've found all the agentic-type things to be basically the same? Even if you're fairly involved in the code, you're still just mostly reading diffs and editing the odd line, the kind of basic work that's the same across all modern editors.
- themafia 4mo agoThe profession has grown to a point where most people doing the work don't actually maintain it as a hobby. It seems like it's a purely commercial endeavor for them, so things that are traditionally sacrosanct, have become quite fungible.