The Self-Driving IDE Is Coming

A deliberately top-down May-2024 Sourcegraph architecture essay — Steve warns at the open that he's skipping the stories because he wants the structure to land. The problem: coding assistants live as IDE plugins, and the IDE landscape is fifteen-plus incompatible plugin APIs, each requiring its own headcount. You can go horizontal (everywhere, thin features) or vertical (deep in one or two IDEs, betting everyone switches to VS Code). Almost nobody goes for the full matrix because the work is unglamorous and "nobody gets promoted for writing IDE plugins." Sourcegraph's bet, walked through in unusual detail, is to take Cody's actual VS Code extension and run it outside VS Code, inside a TypeScript/Rust backend (the Cody Client Backend) that mimics the VS Code API surface to the extension while routing every call through the user's real IDE. Steve compares it to The Truman Show; he also admits it's "completely insane" — a multi-hop, bidirectional, asynchronous, stateful protocol with 100+ JSON-RPC calls and growing. In spirit, an LSP for the AI age.

The title's argument arrives near the end. Early self-driving cars were normal cars with a retrofitted unit that operated the wheel, pedals, and instruments; Cody is that retrofit unit for an IDE — a hundred-plus puppet-strings into every important editor operation, with the LLM at the other end. The closer is dismissive of the agent-startup crowd: their agents are "still in JARS, wired up to toy interfaces" and generating web apps for non-coders. The real frontier is the plumbing into the editors developers actually use, and that plumbing is what lets autonomous agents eventually drive real work.