Readit NewsNeither? I'm surprised nobody has said it yet. I turned off AI autocomplete, and sometimes use the chat to debug or generate simple code but only when I prompt it to. Continuous autocomplete is just annoying and slows me down.
You could also use these AI coding features on a plug-and-play basis with an IDE extension.
For example, VS Code has Cline & Kilo Code (disclaimer: I help maintain Kilo).
Jetbrains has Junie, Zencoder, etc.
owendarko commented on OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/swyx
The thing is: we should not need standalone editors just to use AI coding agents. They could be just plugins, but Microsoft does not want to bend the plugin API enough for that. Windsurf has a "plugin edition" for JetBrains IDEs that works really, really well[0] (they also have a VSCode plugin[1] but it's lacking in comparison).
However, given that JetBrains also have their own AI offering[2], I'm not sure how long that will last too...
[0] https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/20540-windsurf-plugin-f...
[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Codeium....
There are already a bunch of open source, free, and popular "AI coding agent" extensions for VS Code:
1) Cline (1.4mil downloads)
2) Roo Code (a fork of Cline, 450k downloads)
Still a drop in the bucket compared to Cursor in terms of # of users, but they're growing pretty fast.
Disclaimer: I maintain Kilo Code, which competes with 1) and 2) so I'm pretty familiar with this space/the growth patterns.
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owendarko commented on OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/swyx
We're reaching a point where we don't need to switch to another IDE (from VS Code/IntelliJ/insert-your-IDE-here) for "AI/vibe coding"
IDEs can support "AI coding agents" on their own.
The entire workflow for "AI coding agents" boils down to:
1. You write a prompt
2. The "agent" wraps it in a system prompt and sends it to the LLM
3. The LLM sends back a response
4. The agent performs specific actions based on that response (editing files, creating new ones, etc.)
Microsoft already started doing that with Copilot. And they have a vibrant ecosystem of VS Code extensions (I maintain one of them [1])
"AI agents" should be a feature, not a separate piece of software (IDE) that's integral to software devs.
owendarko commented on Cursor hits $9B valuation ft.com/content/a7b34d53-a... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
> P.S. I maintain a VS Code extension that does the 4 steps above as a baseline[1]
Still needs an IDE!
Why should I use kilo instead of aider?
1. Kilo Code works inside VS Code. Aider works inside the terminal.
2. Kilo is a feature-merge of Roo+Cline+our own features. This means at least 20 new features are added weekly.
owendarko commented on Cursor hits $9B valuation ft.com/content/a7b34d53-a... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
The key word in the OP post is “Claude”. Anthropic has 2 amazing AI models (Sonnet, Opus), however they’re just a part of a much bigger picture.
When using AI for programming, you’re essentially interacting with AI models. The quality of output you get really depends on the model at the end of the day. Claude Code is optimized for models from Anthropic. You also have model-agnostic agents like Cursor and Kilo Code (disclaimer: I work at Kilo) where you can easily switch up models and see which one works the best for you converting an old jQuery + Django project into SvelteKit.
This area is moving at a crazy rate. Just the last 2 weeks alone, there were 3 main AI model versions released (first Gemini 3, then Opus 4.5, then GPT-5.2). I wrote a piece comparing their performance across 3 coding tasks [1]
So my advice is to also experiment a lot with the models because the quality can vary wildly depending on your stack.
[1] https://blog.kilo.ai/p/we-tested-gpt-52pro-vs-opus-45-vs