👋 Hi, this is Gergely with a subscriber-only issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover challenges at Big Tech and startups through the lens of engineering managers and senior engineers. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here. Before we start: It’s Black Friday week, and The Pragmatic Engineer has a special offer for the occasion. Get 20% off when subscribing for an annual plan. Full subscribers get full deep dives on Tuesdays, and tech industry news and analysis in The Pulse on Thursdays. See all articles published the last 12 months – several you might have missed! – and claim your discount here. If you have a learning and development budget, you might be able to expense this subscription. Here’s an email template for sending to your manager. IDEs with GenAI features that Software Engineers loveAI-first IDEs like Cursor, WindSurf, Zed and others, are challenging Visual Studio Code’s dominance. What’s making devs switch over?
This week, there will be no Pulse article on Thursday because it’s Thanksgiving and I’ll be on break. Today’s issue is a mix of a deep dive about popular IDEs, and a Pulse-style recap of what’s happening in tech. In this issue, we cover:
The bottom of this article could be cut off in some email clients. Read the full article uninterrupted, online. 1. Which IDEs do software engineers love, and why?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. To get a sense of how preferences of developers might have shifted, I asked:
I posted on Bluesky, on X and on Threads, and received 145 often detailed responses. We look into it below. As with all research, we have no affiliation with any of the vendors mentioned, and were not paid to mention them. More in our ethics policy. Data sourceMost 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.
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. 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. Favorite IDEs
Most popular by number of mentions:
IDEs in the ‘other’ slice with a couple of mentions:
Pricing: are all tools heavily subsidized?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. Free tools (for basic usage):
Tools costing $10-30/month for professional-grade capabilities:
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. The only tool costing above $30/month is Augment Code, which charges $60/month, per developer. Assuming there’s a productivity boost from using this tool, even this lofty price tag would be a bargain. As such, these prices feel heavily subsidized by vendors, who may be offering capabilities at a loss. Giving away GenAI functionality for free or at a low price, means vendors must fund the infrastructure powering these models from sources other than revenue. 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. With that, let’s look at the most popular IDE startups, and why engineers prefer them over established tools like VS Code. CursorThe 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 2023, when they added support for the Sonnet 3.5 model and made it the default. Here’s some reasons why Cursor is the favorite IDE of developer Roman Tsegelskyi, as shared by him:
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:
Other useful features for developers:
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. WindsurfThis 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.
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. 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. Here’s a comparison between Cursor and Windsurf by former product manager Amul Badjatya, who uses both for coding:
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: How big is the team at Windsurf? ‘The engineering team as a whole is upwards of 50 people. Product engineering, research, and infrastructure all had to come together to create the Windsurf experience – especially Cascade.’ How did the team come up with Cascade? ‘We started with the existing paradigms of AI usage:
‘Both copilots and agents are powerful, but have generally been seen as complementary because their strengths and weaknesses are indeed complementary. ‘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. ‘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.’ Which LLM does Cascade use? ‘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.’ Did you use Windsurf to build Windsurf? ‘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.’ Can you give an example of a large codebase that uses Windsurf, and how large it is? ‘Henry Shi, the cofounder of Super.com (a $100MM/yr business) used it on their large codebase, which has millions of lines of code in the monorepo, supporting their frontend across 10+ domains.’ ZedThis IDE was publicly released in March 2023, the same month as Cursor launched. The tool is built by a core team of 14 developers, and is one of the only AI tools to offer free, unlimited AI completion for registered users – thanks to a collaboration with Anthropic. This feature will surely become a paid product, in the future. Here’s why Zed is the favorite editor of software engineer and founder, Siddhart Jha:
Other reasons devs prefer Zed:
Notes on Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDEsEngineers 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. 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. Where is JetBrains AI? An interesting observation about JetBrains is that most devs using its IDEs also use GitHub Copilot as the LLM, even though JetBrains offers its own JetBrains AI. This service is at exactly the same price point as Copilot, so it would be expected that devs on JetBrains IDEs use the provided LLM tool. But it doesn’t seem to be happening. Feedback shared by engineers is that JetBrains AI is not as good as the competition: specifically, it doesn’t ingest code as efficiently as others. Given that AI assistants continuously improve, as and when JetBrains does so then it might be able to bring back customers already using their IDEs. Is this an IDE revolution?Many IDEs have launched and gained momentum in the span of 18 months, and the innovation isn’t over yet. 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:
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. 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. At the same time, Microsoft is still in an enviable strategic position in this AI-powered IDE competition:
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. It’s clear that Microsoft is being out-innovated by startups like Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, and others with plentiful investment in becoming the winner of an AI-powered IDE battle to be the next JetBrains of the AI era. Meanwhile, JetBrains is the #2 IDE tools maker, globally, behind Microsoft, with 16 million developers using its products; so it’s already a pretty big target to shoot at. Good luck to all teams building innovative IDEs. As a software engineer, why not try some of the new challenger products; they may help increase productivity and make day-to-day work easier! 2. Industry pulse10 and 11 December to be huge launch days?...Subscribe to The Pragmatic Engineer to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of The Pragmatic Engineer to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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