I believe our definitions of "winning the IDE wars" are very, very different. For one thing, using "user count" as a metric for this like using "number of lines of code added" in a performance review. And even if that was part of the metric, people who use and don't absolutely fall in love with it, so much so that they become the ones advocating for its use, are only worth a tiny fraction of a "user".

neovim won the IDE wars before it even started. Zed has potential. I don't know what IntelliJ is.

I wouldn't bet on an Electron app winning anything long-term in the dev-oriented space.

In user numbers, maybe. JetBrains is far ahead in actual developer experience though

- don't learn from what you tell them

- don't have career growth that you can feel good about having contributed to

- don't have a genuine interest in accomplishment or team goals

- have no past and no future. When you change companies, they won't recognize you in the hall.

- no ownership over results. If they make a mistake, they won't suffer.

You'd also have no intrinsic memory of past interactions if we removed your hippocampus.

Coincidentally, the hippocampus looks like a seahorse (emoji). It's all connected.

Sounds like a junior developer?

They can usually write code, but not that well. They have lots of energy and little to say about architecture and style. Don't have a well defined body of knowledge and have no experience. Individual juniors don't change, but the cast members of your junior cohort regularly do.

"brooms"

They have a capacity to "learn", it's just WAY MORE INVOLVED than how humans learn.

With a human, you give them feedback or advice and generally by the 2nd or 3rd time the same kind of thing happens they can figure it out and improve. With an LLM, you have to specifically setup a convoluted (and potentially financially and electrical power expensive) system in order to provide MANY MORE examples of how to improve via fine tuning or other training actions.

Hold that thought.

Being antisocial isn't an introvert thing. I'm incredibly introverted and still love having time interacting with people

I'm an introvert and I love working with nice people.

I just need some time by myself to recharge after all the social interactions.

There's some irony in that, given how many other companies have "created browsers" that are just Chromium forks and rubbed Google the wrong way.

The intro checklist for Antigravity includes watching VS Code tutorials!

+1 - it also doesn't support remote ssh (the open vsx variant), so is probably only focused at local web design development vibe coding ;(

Should have just been an extension with a paid plan.

AI companies blogs are not for devs, they write for tech journalists to hype

It's so obvious from even just the vague screenshots that are hidden somewhere on the site that it's a VSCode fork, that I suppose I can see why they've tried to obfuscate that as much as possible.

It's Windsurf

The welcome video says "We started with the core IDE then..." and shows a picture of VS Code.

They knew exactly what they were saying.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge

Nothing in there about chromium.

Why credit? Come on, the world has moved on from 1990s-era 4-clause BSD licenses. If you recall, the 4-clause BSD license states that all advertising materials must display an acknowledgement. It’s widely considered to be a mistake and nobody uses this license any more. Not because of legal reasons (incompatibility with GPL) but because it is madness to require so many acknowledgements. Stallman was right.

Google is going to win AI and kill all the other market participants.

They have the revenues to support all of this.

They spent time learning from all the players and can now fast follow into every market. Now they're fast and nimble and are willing to clone other products wholesale, fork VSCode, etc.

They're developing all of this, meanwhile Pichai is calling it a "bubble" to put a chill on funding (read: competition). It's not like Google is slowing down.

We had a chance to break them up with regulation, and we didn't. Now they're going to kill every market participant.

This isn't healthy. We have an invasive species in the ecology eating up all the diverse, healthy species.

a16z and YC must hate this. It puts a cap on their returns.

As engineers, you should certainly hate this. Google does everything it can to push wages down. Layoffs, offshoring, colluding with competitors. Fewer startups mean fewer rewards for innovation capital and more accrual to the conglomerate taxing the entire internet.

Chrome, Android, Search, Ads, YouTube, Cloud, Workspace, Other Bets, and AI/Deepmind need to be split into separate companies.

Call or email your legislators and ask for antitrust enforcement: https://pluralpolicy.com/find-your-legislator/

Demand a Google breakup.

And VSCode is based on Chromium (a fact you won't find on VS Code's website other than related to updates).

I am not fan of Eclipse, mostly due to bad experience with it, but this is excellent idea, if more people and companies would invest in it's development, we would have alternative to VS Code.

They're subsidising calls for data & reward signals. If they can do that without also sharing the data with other providers it's a win/win.

it isn’t http://ghuntley.com/fracture

forking vscode? simple. extensions not so simple. they are controlled by microsoft. without them you’ll run into continual papercuts as a vendor who has forked vscode.

Why the need to fork it instead of creating a new extension? (besides marketing)

Looks like they managed to make it Mac only in the process.

Many software engineering principles have been broken.

Google using Electron tells us that quality control is completely out of the window.

Unbelievable.

Well it's a helluva lot faster to make for one. For two, just about everyone knows how to navigate in vscode by now. Reducing the barrier of entry has obvious advantages.

These new editors are trying to differentiate themselves via their AI features. Working on the core editor may waste resources that could have been better spent improving the AI features.

How would you say Zed is innovating? Never heard of it, just taking a peek now.

Making an IDE sounds like an insane amount of effort.

FWIW, the Fuchsia team was working on an editor that had a Flutter UI when run in Fuchsia:

https://xi-editor.io/frontends.html

> I wonder why they are not trying to fixup something extremely complex that only a handful players managed to get right using gui stacks made with only mobile in mind that are desperately trying to catch up to desktop now

You just described Eclipse RCP.

The issue with Eclipse and that approach is the complexity of mixing plugins to do everything, which kills the UX.

When VSCode started, the differentiator from Atom and Eclipse was that the extension points were intentionally limited to optimize the user experience. But with the introduction of Copilot that wasn’t enough, hence the amount of forks.

I think that the Zed approach of having a common protocol to talk with agents (like a LSP but for agents) is much better. The only thing that holds me from switching to Zed is that so far my experience using it hasn’t been that good (it still has many rough edges)

there are now 15 competing standards

> AIUI the forks are required because Microsoft is gatekeeping functionality used by Copilot from extensions so they can't be used by these agents. reply

I always wonder how this works legally. VSCode needs to comply with the LGPL (it's based on Chromium/Blink which is LGPL) ; they should provide the entire sources that allow us to rebuild our own "official" VSCode binary

Could you give an example of what they're gatekeeping for Copilot exclusively? I'm kinda confused because Copilot in VS Code isn't exactly a powerhouse of unique features in my experience, it still feels well behind Roo/Kilo Code in most ways I can think of, although much closer to the competition than it was a year ago.

> AI UI

2026: every day ...

I was going to ask why all these companies choose to fork the entire IDE rather than just writing an extension like every other sane developer, and this response is the most believable reason why.

But Microsoft made VSCode lol, I think being able to gatekeep things like that shouldn’t allow a billion dollar company just reuse all of your code instead of making their own IDE

Microsoft has very specific constraints on what extensions can and can't do, it's not a free for all. They're actively defending their mote by allowing Copilot to do things in a way that extensions couldn't. That's why all the serious contenders make a fork, it's simply not possible to have the same integration otherwise.

Most of the AI products are not for the end user, they are just signaling shareholders and possible investors that the company is on the hype.

funny my magic 8 ball says the same thing!

I know Google is quick to shut things down but these ultra-cynical ultra-skeptical HN takes are so tiresome at this point.

It does?

Google AI studio is their developer dashboard.

Google Vertex is their equivalent of Amazon Bedrock.

Google Gemini Chat is their ChatGPT app for normies.

Google Antigravity is their Cursor equivalent.

The also launched a coding agent Jules: https://jules.google/

you forgot jules

Sure. Honestly I think you can get the same with git work trees, though I haven't tried.

After a couple iterations on this, I've ended up having claude code vibe-code a helper CLI in Go for me which I can invoke with `ontheside <new-workspace-name> <base-change>` and will

- create a new jj workspace based on the given change

- create a docker container configured with everything my unit tests need to run, my claude code config mounted, and jj configured

- it also sets up a claude code hook to run `jj` (no arguments) every time it changes a file, so that jj does a snapshot

- finishes by starting an interactive claude code session with `--dangerously-skip-permissions`

- it also cleans it all up once I exit the claude code session and fish shell that's running it

With this I can have Claude Code working asynchronously on something, while I can review (or peek) the changes in batch from my main editor by running `jj show <change-id>` / `jj diff -r "..."` (which in my case opens it up in the Goland multi-file diff viewer). I can also easily switch to the change it's working on in my main editor, to make some manual modifications if necessary.

This is, in general, primarily for "in the background async stuff" I want to have it work on. Most of the time I just have a dead-normal claude code session running in my main workspace.

Minor self-plug - if you want, I posted a jj intro article a while ago[0], though it doesn't include my current workspace usage.

[0]: https://kubamartin.com/posts/introduction-to-the-jujutsu-vcs...

why?

EDIT: why must users care?

it's funny - nervous funny, not haha funny - that you think drawing a real issue like this out into the open would focus an organization on solving it.

Humans are just better at communicating about their process. They will spend hours talking over architectural decisions, implementation issues, writing technical details in commit messages and issue notes, and in this way they not only debug their decisions but socialize knowledge of both the code and the reasons it came to be that way. Communication and collaboration are the real adaptive skills of our species. To the extent AI can aid in those, it will be useful. To the extent it goes off and does everything in a silo, it will ultimately be ignored - much like many developers who attempt this.

I do think the primary strengths of genai are more in comprehension and troubleshooting than generating code - so far. These activities play into the collaboration and communication narrative. I would not trust an AI to clean up cruft or refactor a codebase unsupervised. Even if it did an excellent job, who would really know?

> you can ask the agent to give you an overview of the architecture and then dive into whatever part you want to explore more.

This is actually a cool use that's being explored more and more. I first saw it in the wiki thing from the devin people, and now google released one as well.

Because what we need is not lazy people - we need lazy people with AI? How is this even a justification?

This argument warrants introspection for "crusty devs", but also has holes. A compiler is tightly engineered and dependable. I have never had to write assembly because I know that my compiled code 100% represents my abstract code and any functional problems are in my abstract code. That is not true in AI coding. Additionally, AI coding is not just an abstraction over code, but an abstraction over understanding. When my code compiles, I don't need to worry that the compiler misunderstood my intention.

I'm not saying AI is not a useful abstraction, but I am saying that it is not a trustworthy one.

The increasing levels of abstraction work only as long as the abstractions are deterministic (with some limited exceptions - i.e. branch prediction/preloading at CPU level, etc). You can still get into issues with leaky abstractions, but generally they are quite rare in established high->low level language transformations.

This is more akin to manager-level view of the code (who need developers to go and look at the "deterministic" instructions); the abstraction is a lot lot more leaky than high->low level languages.

In the 00s I saw so many C codebases with hand-rolled linked lists where dynamically resized arrays would be more appropriate, "should be big enough" static allocations with no real idea of how to determine that size, etc. Hardly anyone seemed to have a practical understanding of hashes. When you use a higher level language, you get steered towards the practical, fundamental data structures more or less automatically.

even JS doesn't churn as fast as the models powering vibe coding, and that cut & paste node app is still deterministic, compared to what happens when the next version of the model looks at AI-generated code from two years ago...

If both work equally well then why does it matter whether Zed or VSCode is under the hood?

I love Zed code. Sad that Sublime Text is not keeping up.

Back when Cursor was new (before literally everything was AI hype) they explicitly called out that they wanted to do more in-depth integration with the editor than was possible with just the extension APIs.

Presumably that hasn't changed much. If you want to do any large-scale edits of the UI you need to spin up a fork.

Correct. One could say the same thing for browsers. I suppose on the one hand it's good that it's relatively easy to spin up a new project like this, on the other hand one must swear allegiance to their large software company of choice.

You'll need a Chromium based app to count the installs for you.

My YC2026 startups are an AI agent that automatically manages your VSCode forks, and a public safety computer vision app for smart glasses that predicts whether someone can afford a lawyer based on their skin color

Then who are they targeting? Who else would currently be "implementing every single step"?

Horse racing didn’t go away and there are more people who race horses professionally than who race cars.

We‘ll wait and see.

Car manufacturers made profit

They will equally be tired of being told yes by LLMs.

Thank you. Seems the website didn't like this btw, Safari macOS. Forced return to top of page when scrolling too fast.

I'm on a Mac and that scrolling speed is not how Mac's scroll. The acceleration and drag are all wrong.

It's weird and laggy on Mac too. Not sure who this is for.

They should not be too metaphorical when naming a clone, tho.

As the parent said, actual anti-gravity is world-changing technology. It's telling the very laws of nature to go fuck themselves, you're gonna do what you want, even if all of known physics says it's impossible.

Working at a higher conceptual level is just project management. You're the legislator giving out unfunded mandates rather than the agency staff that has to figure out how to comply. There's power there, but it isn't anti-gravity.

That said, I suspect this is really meant to allude to https://xkcd.com/353/.

yup, vibium!

My personal mac worked, my work mac is spinning.

It has jamf among other stuff

You mean Android Studio will be canned in 2018 max with a reasonable estimate of 2016-2017?

Which is is, vi or emacs?

Do you really think antigravity will last longer than 1 year?

I love how being a paying Workspace customer for a decade or more has actually locked me out of so many Google products and features.

Not that I have any desire to try this at this point, but it's always felt ironic.

Thanks. Actually did use my personal account and got the issue nonetheless.

There is a setting to disable telemetry, unclear what this means though.

Not but you can be quite sure somewhere deep inside the TOS there is a line saying their telemetry swallow your soul. If not, it will be added. It's google, that's what they do.

Something something, "my kingdom for a horse." Obligatory upvote, wp

This pun made me actually laugh out loud. I almost lost some coffee.

It's actually this, the command line tool is `agy`

Thank you for the demonstrating the reasoning that leads to these decisions.

Which comic would that be?

Later edit: Probably this one [1], which is par for the course for Alphabet, they're, conceptually, still living in the early 2010s, when this stuff was culturally relevant.

[1] https://xkcd.com/353/