This is why I uninstalled Cursor and moving to the terminal with Claude Code. I felt I had more control to reduce the noise from LLMs. Before, I noticed that some hours were just wasted looking at the model output and iterating.

Not sure if I improved using agents over time, or just having it in a separate window forces you to use them only when you need. Having it in the IDE seems the "natural" way to start something and now you are trapped in a conversation with the LLM.

Now, my setup is:

- VSCode (without copilot) / Helix

- Claude (active coding)

- Rover (background agent coding). Note I'm a Rover developer

And I feel more productive and less exhausted.

Why Helix specifically, besides the fact that it’s cool? I’m looking for a reason to try it, but the value props seem really far down the list of usability issues that are important to me.

Also, Codex Cloud and similar services require you to give fully access to your repository, which might trigger some concerns. If you can run it locally, you still have the control, same development environment, and same permissions.

It doesn’t have access to your repo when the agent is running (unless you give it internet access and credentials). The code is checked out into the sandbox before it’s let loose.

Hey! Angel from Endor / Rover :)

Thanks for your feedback! I faced this in the past. As you mentioned, monorepos are more common these days, but multi-repo is an established approach in many teams. The way I "solved" this situation was to move all the related projects into a single folder with a parent AGENTS.md file (CLAUDE.md, etc.). Then, I run Rover / Claude / Gemini on this folder.

However, this is not ideal. Due to the amount of code, it usually misses many things to do. We are currently exploring specific workflows for these use cases, trying to help agents to prepare a complete plan.

Another similar case we are working on is to support spawning the same task across different repositories. This would help teams to apply refactor or changes in different projects at the same time.

Custom elements are really great for editors and developers. You can provide a rich set of primitives that editors can use to display certain content. In the past, I used MDX [1] extensively so non-technical writers can create a rich UI for a documentation site.

- [1] https://mdxjs.com/

I just wanted to throw some extra :hearts: towards https://mdxjs.com/ it's really the best of both worlds.

May I ask what you are using instead nowadays?

MDX is great and I like to use it.

Hyprland is on my todo list because I think it will the reason why I move to Linux. The level of customization and performance is amazing. You can build the desktop you want.

I’ve been using it for a year and can’t say it does anything I couldn’t do with dwm, xmonad, i3wm over my past 18 years of tiling WM experience.

IMO it's a matter of effort involved. You can get the cool animations in most WMs but for the majority, it's certainly not out of the box.

I like the concept. Many times I look for high quality articles to go deep on some topics. I recommend you the fly.io blog [1], it has really nice articles.

[1] https://fly.io/blog/

Added: https://engineering.fyi/company/fly

Adding to the list!

For me, the main difference is that LM Studio main app is not OSS. But they are similar in terms of features, although I didn't use LM Studio that much.

Many companies are considering IDEs the way to reach developers. Atom started the trend of next generation IDEs and VSCode consolidated most of the market. With the AI raising, people are looking to get usage, gathering data, and positioning models. An IDE provides you all of that.

AI seems to be a way to engage happy users to try new things. Kiro joins a growing list of projects:

- Kiro (AWS)

- VSCode + Copilot (Microsoft)

- Windsurf (OpenAI tried to get it)

- Cursor

- Trae (Alibaba)

- Zed

- etc.

I put Zed in a separate category in the past. Now with assistants / agents, it's playing on the same space.

The market is a bit saturated and tools like Claude Code gave some flexibility and an alternative for users. I tried Cursor in the past, and now I'm back to Helix / VSCode + Claude Code.

I love Zed as an editor/IDE without ANY AI/LLM features. I think the AI support in Zed is actually pretty decent and I'm still using it out of habit (actively trying to use more TUI for AI).

But at the same time, it's my biggest worry that they will continue on the AI and pollute the project with too much junk. I gotta trust the smart minds behind it will find a way to balance this trend.

Totally. I think Zed has its own value proposition. That's why I never put them close to other editors like Cursor at the beginning.

Lately, I started putting it together due to all the AI excitement. People try it because of the AI capabilities to find an IDE that works for them.

I hope Zed continues providing new amazing features in all the areas.

I am disappointed at Java support in Zed

> Windsurf (OpenAI tried to get it)

And Google killed it.

It makes we attracted to Vim/Emacs. They'll be the same until I die.

This is the kind of introduction I was looking for! I'm currently learning a bit more about this instruction set, so that's perfect.

Also, there are so many great resources in the comments.

Any time I read about Z80, my mind wants to try to run something on a GameBoy emulator.

Pretty cool project!