I've played with Cursor, it felt like all it has is a simple wrapper around Claude. It repeats what I've been doing manually before, namely copy pasting small code blocks into Claude and asking it to fix it. Cursor doesn't add much to that, plus it struggles sometimes when Claude says to insert something somewhere, Cursor fails to find out where that 'somewhere' is. The 'edit in text' function feels identical to Github Copilot, perhaps better in immeasurable 'quality' since Claude codes pretty well.
Somewhere out there is a far more 'native' way of coding with the AI together, where the LLM constantly sees the entire code base as you code; you don't code 'into the codebase', but you code 'into the LLM'. Hard to explain what I mean here...
Some thoughts on what I'd think would be requirements for a step function improvement in code editors for the new age:
- Human collaboration is a first class citizen if not the main design pillar. Instead of having add extensions for git, github etc. these need to be baked into the IDE. In-line blame, graph/UI for git history, diffs, team code editing etc.
- Basic code assistance utilities: Intellisense, Linting, Static Analysis, Formatting, Docstring Preview, Type Hinting, Dependency graphs, Code Metadata should again be key features that ships with the IDE as opposed to being enabled through extensions.
- Modern AI based code assistance: in-line code assistive comments based on review of what you wrote, tab autocomplete (this is covered well by the AI code editors/extensions), automatic documentation
- Implementation in C/Rust with effective/efficient usage of compute resources. Zed does do this
- Baking in project management/collab from JIRA/Linear: This would be the only way to keep human engineers collaboration not woefully slower than AI 'engineers' who would automatically bug fix, push, do PRs, review PRs etc.
- Environment, Containers and package management baked in with nice UX. Python (the most popular language today) has a very fractured ecosystem with conda, venv, virtualenv, pipenv etc. Replace these with using uv+ruff (as they are FOSS) baked into the IDE.
I've played with Cursor, it felt like all it has is a simple wrapper around Claude. It repeats what I've been doing manually before, namely copy pasting small code blocks into Claude and asking it to fix it. Cursor doesn't add much to that, plus it struggles sometimes when Claude says to insert something somewhere, Cursor fails to find out where that 'somewhere' is. The 'edit in text' function feels identical to Github Copilot, perhaps better in immeasurable 'quality' since Claude codes pretty well.
Somewhere out there is a far more 'native' way of coding with the AI together, where the LLM constantly sees the entire code base as you code; you don't code 'into the codebase', but you code 'into the LLM'. Hard to explain what I mean here...
Some thoughts on what I'd think would be requirements for a step function improvement in code editors for the new age:
- Human collaboration is a first class citizen if not the main design pillar. Instead of having add extensions for git, github etc. these need to be baked into the IDE. In-line blame, graph/UI for git history, diffs, team code editing etc.
- Basic code assistance utilities: Intellisense, Linting, Static Analysis, Formatting, Docstring Preview, Type Hinting, Dependency graphs, Code Metadata should again be key features that ships with the IDE as opposed to being enabled through extensions.
- Modern AI based code assistance: in-line code assistive comments based on review of what you wrote, tab autocomplete (this is covered well by the AI code editors/extensions), automatic documentation
- Implementation in C/Rust with effective/efficient usage of compute resources. Zed does do this
- Baking in project management/collab from JIRA/Linear: This would be the only way to keep human engineers collaboration not woefully slower than AI 'engineers' who would automatically bug fix, push, do PRs, review PRs etc.
more:
- Environment, Containers and package management baked in with nice UX. Python (the most popular language today) has a very fractured ecosystem with conda, venv, virtualenv, pipenv etc. Replace these with using uv+ruff (as they are FOSS) baked into the IDE.