AI Coding Assistants Are Eating the IDE

Two years ago, AI coding tools were autocomplete with a better model behind it. Today, the leading tools plan multi-step changes, run your test suite, and open a pull request — the editor is turning into a place you supervise an agent rather than type every line yourself.

What actually changed

The shift wasn’t really about smarter autocomplete — it was tool use. Once assistants could read your whole repo, run commands, and see the results, "agent mode" stopped being a gimmick and started handling real multi-file refactors unsupervised.

What this means for how you work

• Code review time is shifting from writing code to reviewing AI-proposed diffs
• "Prompting well" is becoming as valuable a skill as knowing the language itself
• The editor you choose matters less than how well it integrates agentic workflows

For a head-to-head on the two tools leading this shift, see GitHub Copilot vs Cursor.