IDEs With GenAI Features That Software Engineers Love

Metadata

• Author: Gergely Orosz
• Full Title: IDEs With GenAI Features That Software Engineers Love
• URL: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ide-that-software-engineers-love?r=18spwr&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true

Highlights

• Which IDEs do software engineers love, and why? Software engineers shared their favorite integrated development environments (IDEs) on social media, and the most-mentioned one by a comfortable margin was Cursor. WindSurf and Zed also seem to be getting traction at the expense of Visual Studio, and JetBrains. (View Highlight)
• Industry pulse. The Model Context Protocol by Anthropic; Bluesky getting close to Threads; Automattic crosses another ethical red line; Amazon resignations could be up again, and more. (View Highlight)
• It’s been nearly 6 months since our research into which AI tools software engineers use, in the mini-series, AI tooling for software engineers: reality check. At the time, the most popular tools were ChatGPT for LLMs, and GitHub copilot for IDE-integrated tooling. Then this summer, I saw the Cursor IDE becoming popular around when Anthropic’s Sonnet 3.5 model was released, which has superior code generation compared to ChatGPT. Cursor started using that improved model. (View Highlight)
• Most responses come from Bluesky and X, and it’s noticeable that Bluesky seems to have consistently more developers active on it recently, compared to X. We cover more on Bluesky’s popularity spike in the Industry Pulse section below. (View Highlight)
• This data is likely to be biased towards early tech adopters and non-enterprise users, as I posted on social media, and self-selecting software engineers active on those sites who are likely to be up-to-date on new tools, and willing to adopt them. There were more replies from developers at smaller companies like startups or smaller scaleups, and very few respondents from larger companies. (View Highlight)
• Data from early adopters tends to indicate where innovation is within tooling. However, many tools which early adopters use never go mainstream, often because status-quo vendors adapt their tooling for customers before new competitors can take too many customers. In this case, “mainstream” IDEs are Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and JetBrains IDEs. Their competitors intent on disrupting the status quo are the new IDE startups which have launched within the past couple of years. (View Highlight)
• (View Highlight)
• Most popular by number of mentions:
  1. Cursor. An AI-first code editor, rapidly gaining popularity.
  2. Visual Studio Code with GitHub Copilot. Most respondents using Microsoft’s free IDE reported using GitHub Copilot within this IDE. Visual Studio Code supports many extensions, including the likes of Supermaven and Cline (see below).
  3. A JetBrains IDE with GitHub Copilot. JetBrains makes language-specific IDEs. Those mentioned were IntelliJ, PyCharm, PHPStorm, and RubyMind.
  4. Windsurf Editor. An “agentic IDE” released by Codeium just two weeks ago, which is attracting users fast.
  5. Zed. A next-generation code editor designed for collaboration with AI.
  6. Neovim with Copilot. Neovim is a Vim-based text editor supporting plenty of extensions, including GitHub Copilot.
  7. Supermaven: not an IDE, but an AI completion utility that works in IDEs like VS Code, or JetBrains IDEs. It was acquired last week by Cursor, which looks a smart acquisition.
  8. Aider: a terminal-based pair programming assistant, not an IDE. Those using Aider have an IDE on the side, parallel with AIder.
  9. Cline: an extension, not an IDE. It’s an autonomous coding (View Highlight)
• IDEs in the ‘other’ slice with a couple of mentions: • Cody by Sourcegraph: a coding assistant integrating into IDEs like Visual Studio and JetBrains IDEs. • v0 by Vercel: a text-to-design interface specialized for frontend projects generation (React and NextJS projects) • Replit AI Agent: an IDE to work with an AI agent to generate code • **Bolt.new**by Stackblitz: create full-stack web apps from a single prompt • Neovim Avante: a Neovim plugin designed to emulate the behaviour of the Cursor AI IDE • Eclipse Theia: an open source IDE, which recently shipped AI support • Augment Code: an AI platform designed for teams • Continue.dev: an open source AI assistant • Pear: an open source AI editor (View Highlight)
• All the tools utilize AI models for generating code, and these operations cost money to execute! Even so, several tools are free – with a limit on usage; but even paid-for prices feel very reasonable for professional developer tools. (View Highlight)
• **Tools costing $10-20/monthforprofessional-gradecapabilities:\ast \ast •[Cody](https://sourcegraph.com/pricing)($9/month, Pro plan) • GitHub Copilot ($10/month,Individualplan)•[JetBrainsAI](https://www.jetbrains.com/ai/)($10/month, Pro plan) • Replit AI Agent ($15/month,Coreplan)•[Stackblitz](https://stackblitz.com/pricing)($18/month, Pro plan) • Cursor ($20/month,Proplan)•[v0byVercel](https://v0.dev/pricing)($20/month) • Claude ($18/month,Proplan)or[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt/pricing/)($20/month, Plus plan): necessary to subscribe for tools like Aider, Cline or Eclipse Theia, or when using your preferred model with some tools (View Highlight)
• Team and enterprise prices are more expensive across all tools; usually around double the individual cost. Several add enterprise features like enforcing privacy, admin dashboards, centralized billing, etc. (View Highlight)
• The only tool costing above $20/monthis[AugmentCode](https://www.augmentcode.com/),whichcharges$60/month, per developer. Assuming there’s a productivity boost from using this tool, even this lofty price tag would be a bargain. (View Highlight)
• There is a reasonable expectation that over time, the cost of generating tokens will decrease. However, right now, any engineer making heavy usage of code generation is likely getting good value for money, in terms of the compute required for code generation on larger codebases. (View Highlight)
• The AI IDE startup was founded in 2022, and released the first version of their IDE in March 2023. My sense is that the popularity of Cursor started increasing in around July 2024, when they added support for the Sonnet 3.5 model and made it the default. (View Highlight)
• Here’s some reasons why Cursor is the favorite IDE of developer Roman Tsegelskyi, as shared by him:

  “Cursor [is my favorite] even after trying the competitors. Small things standout:

  1. Cursor rules, and ability to save context

  2. Fast apply compared to competitors

  3. Composer

  Overall, I feel that Cursor also produces better results for me. However, I can’t fully understand why!” (View Highlight)

• Composer is a feature that several engineers mentioned as the main reason they use Cursor. It’s an AI agent-like feature that can work across several files, following instructions to implement functionality described in the prompt. Here’s an example from iOS developer, Thomas Ricouard, instructing Composer to extract key views on a screen of an iOS app into their independent views, and the tool doing the task: (View Highlight)
• Better code generation. Cursor choosing to use Sonnet 3.5 as their default model seems to have been a smart move. GitHub Copliot seemed to respond three weeks ago by ditching OpenAI exclusivity, and allowing developers to also use Anthrophic’s newest LLM model for code generation. (View Highlight)
• Speedy. A common take was that Cursor felt faster compared to other tools. (View Highlight)
• Chat. Several developers like the dedicated chat window, where you can interact with an LLM without leaving the development environment. (View Highlight)
• • Easy in-line editing. Easy to select several lines, then add instructions to the AI on how to edit them • Familiarity. As a Visual Studio Code fork, the user interface is familiar to all VS Code • Switching models. This reveals how different LLMs work, and developers can choose the one that fits best. (View Highlight)
• There are developers who used Cursor for a while, then moved on. The most common complaint I saw was that Cursor gives too many suggestions, and too often; to the point of feeling over-intrusive. (View Highlight)
• This is a recently-released AI code editor, built by Codeium. I sense a similar buzz about it as when Cursor came out, but now Cursor is the one being compared . Windsurf focuses on further improving the collaboration flow with GenAI, and has an interface which makes it a lot easier to follow what the AI is doing. (View Highlight)
• Techies said Windsurf is even more helpful when debugging, that it helps keep people in the coding loop, and proactively offers refactoring of messy codebases. (View Highlight)
• Cascade is one of Windsurf’s “killer” features. Similarly to Compose by Cursor, Cascade is an agentic chatbot to collaborate with across multiple files. It has a “write code” and a “chat” mode. It can also run terminal commands. (View Highlight)
• “I’ve used the Windsurf for 30+ hours and Cursor for 150+ hours in last 8 weeks (premium subscription of both)
  1. The Cascade workflow of Windsurf is superior to the Compose workflow of Cursor, with better indexing (+ code context). Cursor is really bad at it, while Windsurf is just so good, especially when a codebase is evolving fast.
  2. Windsurf Cascade can run terminal commands, but Cursor Compose cannot. This is important because copy-pasting stuff from the terminal no longer breaks your flow.
  3. Cursor’s Claude gets “tired” really quickly, just 30-60 minutes into coding. Meanwhile, Windsurf’s Claude is far more consistent in quality during the first few hours. It’s necessary to restart Cursor multiple times to keep the AI features responsive.
  4. Cursor has a @web tag which helps you assimilate the latest information online, Windsurf does not.
  5. I can never update Markdown files (.md files) on Cursor Compose. They are somehow always half-updated in the file, half updated in the chat. I see similar problems when using other models: instead of modifying files, they reply in chat. I am using Cursor right now for non-code research work due to @ web feature. My code-related work is driven primarily on Windsurf. I’m waiting for code indexing to get better on cursor. Both tools are far ahead of Copilot or other plugins I’ve used. I really like both of them.” (View Highlight)
• It’s rare to see a new IDE be so popular, even with early adopters. I reached out to the Windsurf team for more details about the development of their innovative tool. Their response: (View Highlight)
• Copilots are great because of their collaborativeness with the developer; the human is always in the loop. That being said, to keep the human in the loop, copilots are generally confined to short-scoped tasks. (View Highlight)
• Agents are great because the AI can independently iterate to complete much larger tasks. The tradeoff is that you lose the collaborative aspect, which is why we haven’t seen an agentic IDE (yet). An IDE would be overkill. (View Highlight)
• ‘Both copilots and agents are powerful, but have generally been seen as complementary because their strengths and weaknesses are indeed complementary. (View Highlight)
• ‘The idea of Cascade really stemmed from the question: “what if the AI had the best of both worlds, what if the AI was capable of being both collaborative and independent? This quality is one aspect of what makes humans special. (View Highlight)
• ‘We knew that for this to work, we would need to have a series of purpose-built models, the latency would have to be very low for these agents to feel “collaborative.” and we’d have to find the right way to combine knowledge sources, tool calls, and realtime tracking of developer behavior. These were research problems that had to all be solved to make possible this new paradigm, which we have dubbed as Flows. Cascade is the flow evolution of chat, but it is just the beginning.’ (View Highlight)
• ‘We use a set of many models. Some are third-party models like Anthropic’s or OpenAI’s for some of the long-context reasoning steps, while we have other models for our LLM-based retrieval, fast application of code changes, and more.’ (View Highlight)
• ‘Yes! Many core features we’ve built into Windsurf were built with Windsurf! While forking VS Code, Windsurf was a huge accelerant for helping developers navigate through the new codebase quickly and make changes.’ (View Highlight)
• Engineers sticking with Visual Studio Code or JetBrains seem to mostly use code autocomplete. The big “wow” moments of Cursor and Windsurf are their multi-file editing and agentic capabilities. Devs hooked on this functionality don’t seem to want to go back to the more limited experience offered by GitHub Copilot, and most AI integrations with Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDEs. (View Highlight)
• There are plugins like Cline that work across several files, but the user experience is more limited and confined to being an extension, in contrast to how Cursor and Windsurf build a new type of IDE around these features. (View Highlight)
• Expect even more startups to launch new AI-powered IDEs. There are several AI startups that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and are yet to release a public-facing product, including: (View Highlight)
• Magic.dev: the stealth generative AI startup raised $320M in funding in August, with ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt also investing. The company has not yet released a product, but is working on something new. (View Highlight)
• Cognition AI: the developers behind the “AI developer” Devin raised $175M also in August, and have yet to release a product publicly. (View Highlight)
• Don’t count out Microsoft any time. I was surprised that Cursor is far more popular than Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot because Microsoft has a strong brand, superior distribution, and the tech giant seemed to out-execute GenAI startups in 2021-2024 with GitHub Copilot. (View Highlight)
• GitHub even previewed GitHub Workflows in March, which was supposed to be the evolution of Copilot, and would have brought agentic behavior to Visual Studio. But something seems to have happened since then. GitHub got “stuck” with what felt like an outdated LLM model (GPT 4.0), and did not respond to functionality like Composer by Cursor and Cascade by Windsurf. (View Highlight)
• Nearly all “winning” IDEs are built on top of Visual Studio Code. Both Cursor and Windsurf are Visual Studio Forks. This means that Microsoft can integrate innovations created by those forks quickly enough into Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio. The development effort for this takes months, not years. (View Highlight)
• The GitHub team remains nimble, and will surely respond. When Microsoft acquired GitHub, it did not integrate the organization into Microsoft, but has left it operating relatively independently. This means the GitHub team can move quickly when needed. Already, GitHub Copilot added support for more advanced LLM models like Sonnet 3.5. (View Highlight)
• Microsoft’s distribution advantage is not going anywhere. No other large company can sell enterprise tools to larger companies like Microsoft. For it to remain the vendor offering the most-used AI-powered IDEs, it doesn’t need to be the best on the market because large companies with Microsoft enterprise deals will convert much easier to Visual Studio and GitHub Copilot, rather than to a startup’s tool. (View Highlight)
• Zed is a promising direction, proving it’s still possible to start from scratch. Across the popular IDEs, Zed is the only non-Visual Studio Code fork. The IDE is built from scratch, using Rust. Zed defies what seems to be the conventional wisdom these days: that to build an IDE that gets adoption, it’s unwise to not fork Visual Studio Code. (View Highlight)
• AI-powered IDEs are firmly at the “booming innovation” stage. There are so many AI-powered IDEs because there’s an opportunity to capture a large part of the developer market; this is a market worth billions of dollars in annual revenue, with tech professionals willing to pay for advanced tools that improve their output. (View Highlight)