Software development is changing rapidly and the tool stack has yet to catch up. As we see, the value of IDEs diminishes as developers are less inclined to edit the code now. More and more of the work is browsing and talking to LLMs, less and less is coding and debugging. About 8 years ago I gave a talk at the internal JetBrains conference "Code is hypertext, IDE is a browser". Those points look even more relevant now: effective browsing of code and history is a prerequisite to effective understanding. Understanding underlies everything now. No understanding = no control, then a developer is like a rider who fell off a LLM horse with his foot caught in the stirrup (you may search YouTube to understand what I mean).
The two worlds of programming: why developers who make the same observations about LLMs come to opposite conclusions
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
The Emacsification of Software
We’re all reading a ton of Markdown. It’s been the lingua franca of software development since long before LLMs. But now agents have led us into a cursed renaissance of TUI tooling, and the reading experience has become intolerable. I’m certain that at least 14% of the agita about AI code is driven by exhaustion over incessantly scrolling terminal Markdown.
AI Coding Agents: Adoption Trends - The JetBrains Blog
How many developers use AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, JetBrains Junie, and others)? Evidence from the Developer Ecosystem Survey 2026.
X : What are you interested in? Me : Wow, that varies constantly. Right now? There are a number of topics that I'm actively pursuing … a) When we talk about software engineering we typically think… | Simon Wardley
X : What are you interested in? Me : Wow, that varies constantly. Right now? There are a number of topics that I'm actively pursuing … a) When we talk about software engineering we typically think about the active part of creating code but software development is currently practised as a craft not an engineering discipline. The only engineering discipline in software engineering is testing. This creates a flaw in the comparison with using AI to code because development itself has never been optimised. If all we have to do is write code and we can automate that part then we can just replace those expensive typists with LLMs but development should be, and has the capability to become an engineering discipline. It's just not that for now. https://lnkd.in/eSRprhbf b) Most people talking digital sovereignty are doing so with good intentions but they literally have no idea what they are talking about. This is not because they are daft or foolish but because they cannot see the environment they are talking about. They are like generals talking about territorial sovereignty with no idea of what territory is or how you represent it. https://lnkd.in/eku2X_Ea c) Architectural decisions are made in code and not in the diagrams we create. Those architectural diagrams are more like prompts, wishes and beliefs of what a system should be but rarely reflect the actual system. This creates additional problems when the real architectural decisions are made by coders but coding itself is a craft not an engineering discipline. d) The current crop of LLMs / LMMs are driving us towards a new theocracy. We can counter this through diversity, critical thinking and open approaches but that does mean we have to get to the point of all symbolic instructions being open. That includes the training data. Copyright is a distraction from the real issue that we don't know what the systems are being trained on. Guardrails are a post event kludge. https://lnkd.in/exJVmNvD e) The medium we use in conversational programming environments such as cursor and lovable (or what we call vibe coding when not looking at the code or Software Engineering + AI when looking at the code) appear to be flawed. We are focused on text not images. The change of medium changes the conversation, the corollary is the conversation we have around the screen and the one we have around the whiteboard. Same problem, different medium, different discussion. https://lnkd.in/e_W6b6z3 f) "Value" in consulting land is mostly theatre rather than something meaningful. There are many forms of value but often we fail to identify this, quantify it or even measure it. https://lnkd.in/eeNbR_VY g) Rewilding Software Engineering. To change software development into an engineering practice, we need to introduce two wolves - one that software engineering is a decision making process and secondly that we need to build tools for problems we are facing - https://lnkd.in/epyUnqgh
Andrej Karpathy Stopped Using AI to Write Code. He’s Using It to Build a Second Brain Instead
His new workflow turns raw research into a self-maintaining wiki.No vector databases, no RAG pipelines, just markdown files and an LLM that…
Developers say AI coding tools work—and that's precisely what worries them
Ars spoke to several software devs about AI and found enthusiasm tempered by unease.
jack on Twitter / X
i now spend 2-3 hours per day reading research papers and building something with goose that i didn't think it capable of doing. i never see a line of code, and never trapped in an IDE.it works nearly every time, but does requires some nudging every now and then. incredible.— jack (@jack) June 4, 2025
Sourcegraph — Code Understanding, Oversight and Evolution
Give humans and agents complete context to understand, oversee, and evolve the world's largest, most complex codebases.
Why craft-lovers are losing their craft
Les Orchard made a quiet observation recently that I haven't been able to shake. Before LLM coding assistants arrived, the split between developers was…
Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It
In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird.
Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It
In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird.
Ryan Carson on Twitter / X
I can see a future where it's much faster for all employees to use an IDE with .md files + git instead of Notion, Google Docs or Office.— Ryan Carson (@ryancarson) July 9, 2025
Devs gaining little (if anything) from AI coding assistants
Code analysis firm sees no major benefits from AI dev tool when measuring key programming metrics, though others report incremental gains from coding copilots with emphasis on code review.
Adoption and Impact of Command-Line AI Coding Agents: A Study of Microsoft's Early 2026 Rollout of Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI
Organizations rolling out agentic command line tools like Anthropic's Claude Code and GitHub's Copilot CLI need to know who will try them, who will keep using them, and whether the tools produce enough output to justify their cost. At organizational scale, token spend can run into millions of dollars annually, so misreading adoption, retention, or impact can make a rollout expensive without changing engineering velocity. Studying tens of thousands of engineers at Microsoft over its early-2026 rollout, we find that first use spread primarily through social networks, retention was associated more with engineers' coding activity than with demographics, and adopters merged roughly 24% more pull requests than they would have otherwise. We use merged pull requests as our proxy for output -- acknowledging that a merged PR is not the same as the value it delivers -- and the lift persists across our four-month window. These results suggest that CLI coding agents are neither uniformly adopted nor mere novelty effects and that organizations should treat visible peer use as central to rollout strategy.
Sequoia Backs Zed's Vision for Collaborative Coding
From the Zed Blog: This investment lets us pursue our vision for bringing a new kind of collaboration directly into the IDE.
