00:00:00Today I have a little game for you. Here are a couple of apps, IDEs,
00:00:06agentic engineering tools and I want you to tell me which one is which. Notice something?
00:00:15They're all pretty much the same. Okay, this one is VS Code. It looks different, right? The agent
00:00:22bar here is on the right not on the left and you still have to open one workspace per project so to
00:00:31say. So one VS Code window per project and then you have your agents for this project in here but of
00:00:38course that is also going to change. If you take a look at their release notes we will have the Visual
00:00:46Studio Code agents mode or view or app or whatever in a future version. You could already access it if
00:00:54you are taking part in the VS Code insiders program release channel so to say and in the future VS Code
00:01:02will still stay. You can still use it the way it looks. It works today. That will not go away but
00:01:09in the future you will also be able to use this app as an alternative and you will be able to launch
00:01:17it from inside VS Code and guess what? Here we also then have multiple projects on the left and
00:01:24multiple sessions grouped below the projects there so that you can have one application where you can
00:01:33manage all your agents across all your projects just like in Cloud Code yeah this is Cloud Code
00:01:39or Codex this is Codex or Cursor and Cursor of course still also has the old IDE mode of course
00:01:48if you want that so you can use that and of course there also are the CLIs. I mean you can use Codex or
00:01:55Cloud Code via their CLIs and I do have courses on Cloud Code, Codex and also my AI course here
00:02:02where I cover GitHub, Copilot and Cursor and in there I do cover the IDEs in case of GitHub,
00:02:09Copilot and Cursor so VS Code and Cursor and the CLIs and the desktop apps for Codex and Cloud Code
00:02:17so you have these choices you have these different ways but when it comes to desktop apps we have a
00:02:23pretty clear winner as it seems the editor the IDE if you want to call it like this of the future
00:02:30very much looks like this as it seems and of course that kind of makes sense and of course it's also
00:02:37clear that we don't know if that will really be its final form I guess it's rather unlikely that
00:02:44it is because over the last year alone we've seen so much change so much evolution and development
00:02:52in that space when it comes to how we interact with agents that this very well may not be the final
00:02:59form but right now that is what we have and as I said it kind of makes sense I'm not sure if you
00:03:07should be working on four projects at the same time with five agents doing their thing in each project
00:03:15but that is your thing I personally most of the time only work with one or two agents and yeah
00:03:25because I do want to think about the tasks I give them I want to analyze the code but yeah maybe I'm
00:03:31just old that may also change of course but you can really go nuts and easily work across multiple
00:03:39projects and I mean that is a new paradigm that is something we just didn't do four or three years
00:03:48ago even two years ago that wasn't really a thing you wouldn't have four vs code windows open and
00:03:56constantly jump and switch between them and write code in one project and switch to another you
00:04:01wouldn't do that because guess what you were writing code nowadays of course we and I say we
00:04:10might not be true for you of course but many developers write less code I definitely write
00:04:15less code I've said it in other videos already and yeah since we now orchestrate agents as I said
00:04:23kind of makes sense to have this UI now the thing that these companies are still trying to figure out
00:04:29is the details of that UI of this kind of app I mean for example in in codecs you you have your
00:04:40terminal here at the bottom in clod code you have it on the right so we do have a terminal access
00:04:47there because obviously that kind of makes sense you can argue if on the right or the bottom is
00:04:52better what we also have in both apps is um this little code div preview okay I guess I have no
00:05:00uncommitted changes here but I do have some here in clod code where you can easily take a look at
00:05:06the changes in in your code or the uncommitted changes the changes applied by your agent most
00:05:12likely and where you can even add comments and those comments are then added as context to your
00:05:21conversation this is a feature the new clod code desktop app which was released a few hours ago
00:05:27actually and already covered in my course so that's a feature the clod code desktop app has it's also a
00:05:33feature the codecs desktop app has you also have stuff like a built-in browser here a built-in
00:05:39preview mode in clod code which you can set up and then you can launch a browser and in that browser
00:05:45you can even select elements and add them as context to the conversation so stuff like that
00:05:51exists we also have that in cursor for example they had a pretty big launch it was last year already
00:05:57wasn't it where they announced their browser so that's also something we're seeing that for web
00:06:02development the new interesting thing for these ides and i think vs code also announced something
00:06:09similar yeah that they want to improve their integrated browser what we see is that they're
00:06:14really moving towards a world where you can close the feedback loop easier than before so where you
00:06:22can orchestrate multiple agents across multiple projects but where at the same time you have a live
00:06:28preview in the same ide in the same editor and where you can then click on stuff or add comments
00:06:37as i mentioned here add comments right in in the preview window in the div window so that you can
00:06:43provide that feedback to the aih and that is clearly the direction we're moving towards and what's
00:06:50becoming less important as it seems is of course the traditional ide stuff stuff like the built-in
00:06:58debugger flow which i'll admit i never used to often anyways but yet it seems to be gone stuff
00:07:07like well a file tree right i mean you have a file tree but only for your changes not one by default
00:07:14because who cares about the files if the agent is the one working on them i still do so for that
00:07:22reason i typically have my projects open in vs code and i personally then typically just open
00:07:30a terminal in there and i use something like cloud code or codex or pi with my codec subscription
00:07:38and i'm very much using that terminal based coding assistant approach but here and there i also jump
00:07:46into a desktop app but even then i like being able to view the full file tree and even jump into files
00:07:54that have not been touched at this moment by the agent which is something that's missing in
00:07:59these new ide or these new agentic engineering apps or however you want to call them what they do have
00:08:07or what some of them have is stuff like routines or the codex app has automations which are features
00:08:14where you can use the ai agent for more than just code editing or code generation you can create a
00:08:21routine for example where you make sure that a certain prompt is executed at a certain time every
00:08:29day every weekday and so on that can of course be a prompt that has an impact on your code it could
00:08:33also be a prompt that just analyzes the recent changes the last commits or it does something
00:08:38totally different so we have stuff like that in there but yeah it really looks like the good old
00:08:46ide and code editor may be dying and when i say dying you always have to keep in mind we're talking
00:08:54about a process that will not be super fast even though the entire ai evolution is pretty quick and
00:09:02a lot is changing all the time even with that in mind if we look beyond the tech bubble of which i'm
00:09:09certainly are are part right so i'm part of that bubble i'm fully aware but if we go beyond this
00:09:14bubble if we take a look at normal companies and normal people being employed at companies
00:09:20will not see them abandon ide's and code editors tomorrow that is clear but i think overall in the
00:09:28future yeah the the old school ide will probably be less important i guess though of course i'm also
00:09:38interested in hearing what you're thinking the big question for me right now is will this kind
00:09:44of app win so this desktop application here or will it be cli's terminal user interfaces i mean like
00:09:53clawed code in the terminal which has obvious disadvantages the terminal isn't for everyone
00:09:59right and i personally kind of have my struggles with it but then again as i mentioned i like
00:10:05the flow of being in a normal ide and having my integrated uh coding agent here in the terminal
00:10:12but yeah i see the merits of having um an application like this which looks better is easier
00:10:19to use more user-friendly especially also for beginners or newcomers but also experienced devs
00:10:24of course so that will be interesting which of these approaches will win or will we have both
00:10:31also of course possible definitely the case right now and for the foreseeable future i would guess
00:10:39and as mentioned at the very beginning of course this agentic engineering app style even though it
00:10:47looks similar across all these apps right now will probably also keep on evolving and it'll be
00:10:53interesting to see how our entire workflow and our work environments and the tools we use will look
00:11:02like in a year or so