Who cares about AI’s embedded in IDEs? Here’s the tooling I need

* text editor with intellisense * build system * visual debugger * CLI coding agent

It’s totally fine if those four things are different. In fact I actually probably prefer them to be different. Having an all-in-one IDE is a complete and total non-goal.

People have historically confused the first three as needing to be a single IDE. This has always been wrong. The number of people who think you can’t debug with Visual Studio if the exe wasn’t built from a .sln is shocking. They’re all independent!

Why would you ever want a debugger that isn't integrated with the code editor..? I will never not want to debug code when the current breakpoint and evaluated expressions aren't visible in the code itself.

I mean, look at debugging in IntelliJ: https://resources.jetbrains.com/help/img/idea/2025.3/hotswap...

As opposed to the terminal: https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v16980433...

False dichotomy. Terminal debugging is garbage. The GUI you use for writing code doesn’t have to be the same GUI you use for debugging code.

RemedyBG: https://remedybg.itch.io/remedybg

RadDbg: https://x.com/rfleury/status/1747756219404779845?s=46

I mostly edit code in VSCode. I mostly debug code in VisualStudio. They don’t have to be the same.

I do concede that one tool to rule them all is appealing. But ultimately I work with many different languages so it’s kind of a multi-tool world no matter how you slice it.