The IDEs of May*

*(Alternate title: “Oh, good. My slow-clap processor made it into this thing.”)

Well, first things first - since last we saw each other, I finished up and pushed this new site version after migrating from Material for MKDocs to Astro. I also added my Natural Language Processing model evaluation whitepaper and added some more tooltips and topics. So that’s great!

In fact, I’m currently on another code freeze - and yes, that was fortunately partly because the above work represented my MVP for v1.0 of this site, which was the trigger for it. Unfortunately, it’s also been an, er, exciting couple of months or so in terms of finding an IDE to work with.

In other words, this may be a longer code freeze than expected.

A tale of two three ugh, forget it

I started out initially playing with VS Code with GitHub Copilot. Why (I hear you ask in a bewildered scream)? Because it’s what I’m used to from work. Familiarity — less generously, inertia — has a lot to recommend it.

Things went generally okay for a couple weeks until I started constantly running up against repeated throttling/errors even though I knew I was under my rate limit, and the whole thing became unusable. (Fun fact: GitHub would charge premium model rates even for failed attempts, so if they had issues with service, it still counted against your limit.)

This, by the way, was several months before GitHub announced their new usage-based billing system which went into effect literally today, so I guess I got off easy. It did mean, though, that I had to find a new IDE and do some reshuffling.

Claude was my next port of call - but I got hit with rate limits almost immediately there too and then my account got auto-banned for no reason that anyone has deigned to explain (perhaps because I typically use a VPN, but hard to say - the auto-reply from my appeal provided no further detail). Unfortunate, because I’ve heard a lot of positive feedback about Claude Code actually!

Third on my list was Google Antigravity, and honestly this was a pretty decent experience for a while. The IDE setup was similar to what I was used to from VS Code, and I honestly had no complaints for the month or so that I was using it. It got me through my site migration and some other experimentation. I would still be happily using it if I hadn’t opened it last week to find that Google had thoughtfully replaced the IDE I’d been using with Antigravity 2.0. Among other changes, this completely changed the layout and how my work items were presented (I now seemed to have 25 different versions of a “project” I’d never created in the first place?) and my user experience instantly went from “blandly familiar thing that mostly works as expected” to “indignant bafflement producer”.

Now, look - I’m sure the fine folks at Google (I know a few!) worked hard on this to deliver features they genuinely thought would help people. In fact, I’m sure that the new features are genuinely useful and will help people. Even further, I’m confident that if I’d been sat down and shown what was coming, and perhaps had it explained to me how this could apply to my own setup, I’d actually have been excited!

But instead what I got was a completely out-of-the-blue rug-pull. While it’s technically possible for me to restore the original IDE experience and keep working there the way I was before, the whole thing left such a bad taste in my mouth that I immediately uninstalled and cancelled my Pro subscription.

Yes, I instantly threw away my existing workflow, that I knew I could have gotten back with probably less effort than what I’ll need to do in order to spin up something else. I wouldn’t argue with someone calling it petty, but it’s less about the change in and of itself, and more so because I’m sick of seemingly literally everyone expecting me to just absorb a completely new workflow with no notice and pay for the experience of being an unconsenting beta tester.

So now what

I don’t know. I’m on a code freeze anyway, but between GitHub’s bait and switch on pricing, Google’s forced update to an unwanted new app experience, and waves hand at everything, I’m feeling pretty Not in the Mood to start up another IDE at this moment. (Yes, there are other ways to code but this is what I like, dammit.)

I mean, I know I’m not the only one feeling discouraged and tired of the enshittification of seemingly everything, everywhere. Incredibly poor change management from people who should theoretically know better (et tu, Google?) is also, frankly, discouraging. All the resources in the world and no one thought to ask a change management, comms, UX, or knowledge management person how this should be, well, managed and communicated?

At the same time, Google didn’t really ruin anything - they built a tool that’s probably actually really useful. I just won’t use it, because they damaged my trust by botching the rollout and basically forgetting that their users exist and, like, actually are already using stuff that they’d prefer to not be completely rearranged overnight. The technology matters, but not if people are so confused they don’t use it.

This is an extension of the frustration I’ve been feeling lately around an apparent general dismissal of “soft” skills which are actually differentiators in AI adoption and project success. I see plenty of job descriptions for AI and LLM engineers, but very few still for knowledge or content managers. I think this will probably change soon as forward-thinking teams realize that good data management is paramount for success, and less-forward-thinking teams try to “sprinkle AI on it” without doing the foundational work and hit the Reality Wall in about six months - but in the meantime, it’s just kind of a slog, man.

I also know this isn’t the end of the road - I have Cursor downloaded already, and a freeze-log-notes-v2.md file spun up with a bunch of to-dos. I do believe, also, that the time is rapidly approaching when local, open-source models will be much more viable, enabling people to build their own solutions. I’m very excited for that day.

In the meantime, the weather has gotten fine enough here often enough that it’s a good time to take a general break and go outside in the sunshine. Cursor will be there waiting when I get back.