[matchagaucho]

The difference, though, is these AI IDE startups are essentially built on a fork of Microsoft VS Code.

And MSFT has many end game options to dump free IDEs on the market with integrated AI.

[indigodaddy]

To followup on this train of thought, I feel like it might be game over for everyone else if Google decides to release their own VS code Cursor-like clone and stays consistent with the incredible context and free tier for Gemini Pro that you currently get from online/webui Gemini and Google AI studio.

The question is do they want to go in that direction? (And also if they do, do they only allow Gemini model or do they open it up to a choice of various models (to also include models not related to Google/Gemini) and/or BYOK). I don't see why not because I believe they will slaughter Cursor, Windsurf, et al if so ...

[falcor84]

Google have https://firebase.studio (originally idx.dev), which they recently updated, so I'd assume that they wouldn't want to cannibalize that.

[krashidov]

I'm not sure it matters whether or not it's a fork of VS Code or not.

Zed is a standalone editor written from scratch and it hasn't had the same success as Cursor (yet).

JetBrains IDEs are my absolute favorite. JetBrains controls the entire stack but they haven't had the same results yet. Cursor and Claude Code have some sort of product differentiation here that is hard to argue against.

[nojs]

Incidentally what is the best way to cursify jetbrains at the moment?

[fidotron]

I think it speaks to the SV bubble that the single most valuable application of their LLM that they can think of would be software development.

One of the oddities of Instagram and WhatsApp is both of them were twists on what the expected formula for user value was at the time. (Retro photos and international SMS replacement respectively).

[doctorpangloss]

What is the appeal of VS Code? It's free and the UI looks nice?

[tough]

they already started blocking some MSFT extensions on cursor saw another day a thread on hn about it