From Emacs to Cursor, the end of your IDEs is near

Emacs originated in the era of time-sharing systems and ed (the precursor of vi) is particularly handy over slow network connections. Even when coding remotely, Emacs and vi are the tools I reach for.

The author missed the main reason I favor working locally: privacy, not responsiveness.

We write prompts, launch agents and review what they produce.

What better tool to review that output than the one you know really well? For me and many others, that's Emacs and vi.

Secrets lying around everywhere

If secrets are moved from a local machine to the cloud, are they really secret any more?

As an Emacs user since the Nineties and holder of the view that Emacs _is_ my operating system, I simply can't relate to this on any level.

Now, I won't discriminate against the segment of the industry moving in this direction, but ask yourselves this question: Where is my personal power over my environment, over my code, and do I have the freedom to modify my work and the hardware I do it upon as I see fit? The model proposed and the assertion of the inevitable disappearance of the IDE and personal workspace is done with no consideration of those questions, or the psychology and methodologies of the experienced software engineer.

Of course, the points relating to security and environment stability are problems we all face, but they are also problems that have simple solutions within the existing software development ecosystem. And, I must say, if human verification and "fit for use" validation is not part of this process, then the flaws go beyond psychology and the freedom to tinker.

I mean, there are some interesting takes in here, but at the end of the day it is a highly-opinionated ad for the product they are building, and the perspective they are putting forth is nothing more or less than the perspective of their ideal customer.

I don't agree with their premises and they lost me early on when they posited that the only reason anyone ever coded locally was to avoid network lag. I'd argue price, simplicity, performance, mobility, isolation of your changes, and probably half a dozen other reason I'm forgetting are in that mix, too. I'm sure that in some ways I am an old grey-haired dude whose comfort zone is outdated, but at the same time, if you want to move beyond the old ways of doing things, and create something new, you need to understand why the old ways existed.

This post/advertisement doesn't indicate to me that they started with that baseline of understanding.