The IDEs of April

I can’t tell you how many times I have, in late-night coding frustration, said something like, “why can’t you just do what I meant?” to my unsympathetic computer.

- Curtis Franklin Editor-In-Chief

It turns out that I wasn’t incompetent, just ahead of my time. A new generation of integrated development environments (IDEs) is promising to hold my hand, read my mind, and turn those wayward thoughts into well-structured, properly documented code with the help of AI. I think I may be more excited than terrified at the prospect. There are a couple of IDE developments that show the direction IDEs are taking today. The first is that many developers are moving to Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code, or VS Code, as the IDE for every platform and language in which they work. An enormous marketplace of plugins and extensions (62 for Arduino alone) has turned VS Code into a powerful, open platform used by more than 73% of developers, according to Stack Overflow’s 2024 Developer Survey.