For the last 40 years or so, software development tooling has centered around the IDE — the integrated development environment. Borland is widely credited with bringing the IDE to the masses. The joining of the editor, compiler, and debugger into a single entity revolutionized the software development industry. The popularization of the IDE through the likes of my beloved Turbo Pascal in the mid-1980s marked a huge turning point for coding.
But the IDE’s reign is over. With the unbelievably rapid rise of agentic coding, the IDE has become an afterthought, a tool that developers are finding they use less and less. Instead, developers are spending time managing agents that are actually writing the code.
Things are moving pretty fast, changing monthly if not weekly. It was only a few months ago that I was building things inside my IDE with an agent’s help. But before long, I had four or five console windows open, working on different projects all at the same time as the agents ground away at different things. This was barely manageable when working on separate repositories and projects at the same time, but when I wanted to work on different features inside the same repository, it got a bit hairy.
