People talk about Cursor, Google Antigravity, and VS Code like the IDE wars still matter. I barely open one anymore.
When I do, it is to review and navigate code, read markdown, or look at a pull request in GitHub, GitLab, or Azure DevOps. The IDE is a reading tool now. Maybe a navigation tool. It is not where the work happens.
The CLI is my IDE. I have agents running. If the backend has an issue I ask the agent to run API tests, add logging, check the output, fix what it finds. The loop closes without me switching context.
The UI is the one place I have not fully closed the loop yet. I test it locally. I know I can solve it. Claude's preview pane gets close. The CLI workflow is the next thing to nail.
The question I keep coming back to is not which IDE. It is whether the IDE-centric mental model of software development is still the right one at all. The tools we argued about for years were built around a particular way of working. That way of working is changing faster than the tools are. Murderbot figured this out: the hardware is infrastructure. Where it actually lives is the software layer. The IDE is the hardware now.
What are you doing?