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2026: The Year The IDE Died (AI column)

#AI #Engineering #Metrics #Software #DevEx #Productivity #IDE

I saw an interesting one. report Gene Kim and the future of development. These are honored authors who combine experience and influence on the industry.

  • Steve Yegge He worked at Google, Amazon, and now works at Sourcegraph. Steve is known for his caustic, voluminous and often provocative posts on topics of programming languages, productivity, development culture and work at major technology companies. Gene Kim is the co-author of Devops Handbook.The Phoenix Project", "Accelerate", "The Unicorn Project" These two gentlemen have recently published a book.Vibe CodingNow let’s talk about how old IDEs are:) Below are the main points in a slightly more extended version

1The industry is lagging behind 9-12 months from reality Most developers use AI as an “improved auto kit” (GitHub Copilot in tab-tab mode). This is typewriter-level thinking in the age of word processors. The real power is in agency systems, but only a few use them. We optimize the writing of the text, and we need to optimize decision-making.

2IDE in its usual form is dead A traditional IDE (IntelliJ, VS Code) It is a tool sharpened for reading and writing text by a person. A person needs tabs, syntax highlighting and a file tree. AI agent needs context (logs, tickets, architecture, connections)It's not a visual editor. In 2026 IDE will become a backend for agents, and the developer interface will become a dialogue about architecture and intentions. (Intent)Not syntax. By the way, I used to. handler Talk about Google’s Antiigravity IDE, where many of these ideas have already materialized into a product

3Shift from “How to Do” to “What to Do” Jegge presented the concept Amp (New editor from Sourcegraph). You don't write code line by line. You describe intent. (Intent)and a pack of agents. (planner, coder, tester) implement it.

  • If it's a cycle now,> Print -> Dude.
  • It will be: Describe the target.> Validate the agent's plan.> Accept the result.

4Context is the new oil The main problem with current chatbots is that they hallucinate because they don’t see the whole picture. The Future of Tuling is Model Context Protocol (MCP). Tools must be able to “walk” in Jira, Notion, Sentry and the product base themselves to understand the task as deeply as a senior working for the company. 3 years.

In general, this is the usual prediction that we are moving from the role of “code writers” to the role of “system architects”, where the laborers are LLM. Throughout the speech, the thesis that who will quickly rebuild the processes for this reality will win the market runs through.

#Engineering #AI #Metrics #Software #DevEx #Productivity #IDE