The IDE Is Dead. We Just Haven't Noticed Yet.
One golden rule of agentic coding: Never place your cursor in the editor.
Always tell the AI what to change. Never touch the code yourself. Why? Because every manual edit breaks the AI's context.
So you stop editing.
But then... what is the IDE still doing for you?
Code review? The AI does that. Debugging? The AI does that. Refactoring? The AI does that. Previewing artifacts? I tell the AI how to render a view and get it in the browser.
I literally ran a Slidev presentation server from my terminal last night. No IDE involved. When I needed changes to the slides, I described them in natural language. Done.
The IDE has become a spectator in its own stadium.
Surveys have shown for years that IDEs like IntelliJ are losing users. Most migrated to VS Code. But here's the thing: VS Code is next.
When developers embrace agentic coding, VS Code degrades to a glorified preview window. You don't use its editing features. You don't use its refactoring tools. You don't even use its debugger. You use the terminal. And a browser.
This is genuinely sad for some brilliant work. Alexander Schwartz's Asciidoctor plugin for IntelliJ, for example, is a masterpiece of IDE integration with features no browser can match. Years of craft, potentially obsoleted not by a better tool, but by a paradigm shift that makes the whole category irrelevant.
But that's how technology works. The best horse carriage manufacturer didn't become the best car manufacturer.
The question isn't whether IDEs will disappear. The question is what replaces them.
My bet: a thin terminal + browser combo. The AI orchestrates. You review. The browser renders.
The "Integrated" in IDE meant integrating everything into one tool. Agentic coding disintegrates that. And that's fine.