a clear observation after living in coding agents for the last couple months: IDEs are basically over. the shift in my own IDE usage has been dramatic: i used to spend many hours per day living in an IDE, now i spend mayyybe 30 mins/day in an IDE. almost all my "coding" time is spent managing claude instances via the cli. the IDE going away is an almost obvious conclusion to me at this point. but human's driving cli's obviously won't replace IDE's. the current state is just a bridge to what i think and hope is coming next... i think we'll create a completely new form of "professional" software to manage swarms of coding and non-coding agents, but it won't feel anything like the work software we use today. it will be highly visual, on a 2d (or 3d) canvas, more video game than software. it will feel like an RTS game, but upgraded for the ai era. it will have classic RTS elements -- cursor to select nodes, chat, etc -- but deep voice integration will probably drive many/most of the interactions. maybe even a new tactile interface. something like factorio meets the minority report interface. this won't feel like a retro re-creation of the rts games of my youth. it will probably feel wild, chaotic, maybe even scary at first. it definitely won't feel familiar. figuring out how to manage, motivate, and lead swarms of agents is clearly where we're headed. it could be the great software design problem of this era. we're in the liminal space right now, but whatever comes next, it's going to look very different than a document editor built to manually slap code into a file. excited for the future of making software.

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