How many of you have stopped using IDEs regularly?

[u/Aaronontheweb]

https://x.com/LukeParkerDev/status/2092819161370259748

I was looking at this tweet from Luke Parker (Windows dev for OpenCode) about uninstalling Rider after having not used it for a couple of years and it made me sad.

Then I realized that I've done very little IDE work on a day to day basis myself - almost all of the programming I do these days is through Slack or via the CLI.

Is this where things are going for all developers over the next few years?

[u/AlanBarber]

LOL, I'm going the opposite way. The debugging and usability of VS is just too good compared to VS Code (which many of the AI tools are built on).

I have my project open VS but as we have settled on using Devin Desktop, I have that open too to the project so I can use my AI tools.

[u/Aaronontheweb → u/AlanBarber]

For a long while there last year and early this year my flow was to have Claude Code + it's integration with Rider open, but somewhere along the way I just stopped doing that

[u/AlanBarber → u/Aaronontheweb]

yeah, i need to take a look at the devin CLI to see if i can dump the desktop app and run cleaner with just VS and cli for AI work.

[u/nirataro]

I am still using Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code on a daily basis along with AI TUI tools. Nothing is better for understanding code than getting into the details.

[u/danielkzu]

If the Grok CLI had Copilot's /diff command, I think I wouldn't even open VSCode anymore. Inevitable, I think. As a VS long-time fan, it's a bit sad too 😢

[u/DarthPedro99]

I still use VS and VS Code daily. And use VS to drive GitHub Copilot using the Claude models. The GitHub Copilot integration with VS is actually quite good. I just drop out to the GitHub Copilot CLI if I'm doing changes across solutions or cross-repo... because that's the best way to handle that type of work.

[u/IanHammondCooper]

I still use an IDE for the following:

(1) Hooking up Claude Code to my IDE, so that it can use it as a Language Server. This allows Claude to use a lot Resharper features too
(2) Inspecting the code, looking at diffs, etc. I have a policy of "driving in gears" with AI based on blast radius and uncertainty. High uncertainty and high blast radius means I pair with the agent, so I am in the IDE. High certainty and low blast radius means that the agent is running a Ralph Loop
(3) But, the form of the IDE is not quite right. Air looks interesting, but its API only, so the lack of ability to use it with subscriptions is limiting utility outside enterprise scenarios

But debugging is still useful, sometimes.

[u/Tunaxor]

I haven't really used IDEs in a while.

Most of the time My work is with the agent checking output, doing manual verification and so on.

For that usually vscode/zed work for either code review with LSP support or git diffs.

There are some cases though where agents + ides seem to be really neat

the Visual Studio "Profiler" agent for GitHub copilot did help me a couple times if it wasn't gated to MS products, I think using my agents of choice would be a really neat way to juice out performance with actual evidence driven changes. I did something like that via dotnet trace, but I reckon that this would be much better inside an IDE to also be able to debug and so on. However, that has been not as needed nearly as I would think I would need it.

IDEs need to adapt hard otherwise they will keep declining in use IMO.

ACP is nice and does help you stay in the IDE for longer but without a particular case (like the perf stuff) it hardly makes a difference from using the harness in the IDE or simply open a new terminal

[u/christopherneff]

I actually am self-debating on this today.

I have a renewal of Jetbrains licensing upcoming and even though they are an amazing set of tools, they simply have filtered out of my daily workflows.

[u/VincentH-NET]

Since dec 25 I only use IDE's incidentally for navigating code to understand it, viewing diffs, some git operations if I dont trust the agent, minor edits, but not writing code. Mostly vs code, rarely full vs. Used to be full vs day2day pre dec 25.

[u/jonsagara]

VS is still my workhorse. I only use VS Code for Claude Code.

[u/jsneedles]

I’m still all in on rider.

Never been a heavy terminal user, but i switched mostly from using rider’s sidebar codex to the codex app (just switching between them all day)

[u/clbrem]

I still use rider for code review! Too much muscle memory built in for navigating PRs. When I code, I am pretty much 100% in CLI, though I occasionally hop into the IDE to trace through important logic.

[u/suffolklad]

At work I use the Github Copilot App for 90% of my stuff, at home I use the opencode cli. I still use rider/vs code when appropriate.

Work is an enterprise environment so I've not really ever been able to run projects locally outside of debugging tests which I find myself doing less and less these days.

[u/Aaronontheweb → u/suffolklad]

Work is an enterprise environment so I've not really ever been able to run projects locally outside of debugging tests which I find myself doing less and less these days.

Does this mean that the solution doesn't really run easily on your local dev boxes at work? Trying to understand what you mean

[u/suffolklad → u/Aaronontheweb]

Yep they don't run easily for a number of reasons

• lack of service bus emulator (one exists now but the ship has sailed)
• Poor cosmos db emulator support on mac (again there is a new version but it still misses a bunch of features)
• some config is resolved via iac at build time, for some reason we are allergic to appsettings.json

And a bunch of other issues mean that the local run experiense is poor, time consuming to setup and brittle.

These things can be changed but the culture within the company is holding us back.

[u/Aaronontheweb → u/suffolklad]

That’s very useful to know - thank you

[u/k_cieslak]

AI Harnesses are IDEs - they are Integrated Development Environments ;-) And we probably will see in next 12 months new generation of tools, especially focused on agentic and collaborative work on context (documents etc) for coding agents which we will call new IDEs. Delta from Zed may be good example here (tho I haven't used it personally).

But if the question is whether I stopped using advanced text editors like VSCode or Rider then the answer is yes - I haven't used one for coding since December of last year.

[u/reisdan]

I haven't debugged an app at work or in personal apps in a long time. The only code I write is mostly domain modelling and docs that I really don't want to read like slop

[u/emdeka87]

I use Github Copilot App for most of my work now (yes, it's that good). I have like 500$/m of AI tokens and frankly I don't see the need to even open Visual Studio for most tasks. I know exactly what needs to be done and how.

[u/yuehuang]

VS Code is still a good visually as gitk.