alt Hacker NewsI was surprised people were so willing to jump to closed source IDEs just for access to coding agents. The trade-off you pay for tight integration between the IDE and the coding agent is lock-in because the barrier to switching IDEs is nontrivial.
Your coding environment stands a lower chance of disruption when you use an open source IDE with a CLI agent. Yes it's slightly annoying to separate the agent from the IDE but the benefit is that it's much easier to switch between Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI (now antigravity CLI), etc which means you can more easily benefit from pricing and coding performance differences which seem to change monthly.
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The funny part is that Gemini-Cli is open-source, and now they are getting rid of it for Antigravity CLI.. which is not open-source. Fun.
Closed source IDEs are if anything the norm: Visual Studio, Android Studio, XCode, IntelliJ, CLion, PyCharm, etc... Even in the "fancy text editor" category things like Sublime were always popular enough.
Fwiw, the (mostly) closed source jetbrains IDEs support multiple models with their coding agents, byok, and using different agents like Claude Code via ACP
Antigravity is just a vs code (more correctly: codeium) skin with Google telemetry and agent Integration. You can switch back to Microsoft's or cursor's flavor in minutes.
amen!!
this is why i've built all of my setup using a dotfiles-like approach with the explicit intention of always being agent/model-agnostic: https://github.com/ma08/botfiles
the key insight is that if you own the context layer and keep your skills, hooks etc. portable enough, it's actually very easy to swtich agents at will (even mid-task)