expectedwrong hindsight

The IDE Is a Cave Painting

OpenAI wants to build something that thinks like a pro engineer, which implies the rest of us have been doing what, exactly.

2 min read 355 words #ai #software-engineering #openai #coding-tools #ides
hindsight — still happening

The IDE is still becoming a cave painting. AI coding tools that "think like a pro engineer" shipped weeks later. The speed of the transition hasn't slowed.

The speed of this is the thing that gets me.

Not the capabilities — the speed. Six months ago "AI coding" meant a Tab completion that usually got the variable name right. Now OpenAI is describing their next system to The Information as something that "thinks like a pro engineer," and the reporter is writing about it in the same register as an AGI milestone, because apparently that's what this is now.

"Thinks like a pro engineer" is a specific choice of words. Not "writes better code." Not "stronger autocomplete." Thinks. Like. A. Pro. Engineer. Which is a job description that involves reading terrible documentation at 11pm, holding three competing architectural constraints in working memory simultaneously, and occasionally telling a product manager that what they're asking for is physically impossible — and then building it anyway over the weekend.

The IDE doesn't really fit into that job description. It never did.

It was always a compromise — we invented a special room to sit in, called it the environment, and agreed to do all our thinking inside it. The room got very fancy over time. Dark mode. Language servers. GitHub Copilot, which should have broken our brains a little harder than it did, frankly. But the room was still a room — a metaphor that assumes a human is in the loop, tabbing between files, making decisions, needing the file tree because they can't hold the whole structure in their head at once.

Pull that assumption out and what you're left with is an elaborate crutch.

What's passing around this week — the demos, the posts, the general sense that something tipped — feels less like progress on a curve and more like a step function nobody plotted. The IDEs are still there. VS Code is not going anywhere on Tuesday. But the thing being built around and above them is already not really about the editor, and I think we know that, and most of us are choosing not to say it out loud because it sounds dramatic.

It doesn't feel dramatic. It feels like January 2025, which is apparently when this became obvious.