Seems like Amazon started making this when Cursor was hot in the market, but now that CLI agents like Claude Code are taking over, Kiro will have an uphill battle.
It’s also not free or unlimited (though throttled) like Cursor and Claude Code using max plan.
I think IDE-based tools like Cursor, VS Code, etc, will win out in the long term, especially as the younger generation grows up.
In the short term though, I think CLI-based tools like Claude Code are taking off because hardcore developers see them as the last "vestige" they have in separating themselves from the "noobs." They know there's still a good portion of the public who don't know how to use the terminal, install packages, or even know what Linux is.
Which is kind of ironic since the Amazon Q Developer CLI (which is essentially Claude Code with a slightly different wrapper) was released long before Claude Code and seems to mostly be flying under the radar.
Claude Code really was at the right place at the right time. Cursor started putting new models under their MAX plan that charges per use and I started getting worse results with Cursor over time as they optimized costs. I started looking into Cline/RooCode when Cursor did this because I knew they were in the squeezing customers stage now. I used those for a while with Sonnet thru OpenRouter, but Anthropic had the genius plan of bundling Claude Code with their Max plan. That made a lot of users jump ship from Cursor and the difference is night and day for me. Yes I pay 5 times more than I did with cursor, but still less than using API credits and the results for me have been superior.
Claude Code is what it is because of Claude, TUI or not isn't really the point. What makes IDEs lose to TUIs is that the agentic models can really do more than coding and is evolving toward a hands-off kind of workflow. A clunky IDE is too much for that, but TUI is not the way either. When has TUI ever been mainstream?
Agentic tools of the future will be rich notebook/chat interface that's available in all form factors, which is to say, most likely web/cross platform apps.
You can have an agent loop in your IDE, I don't see why anything makes "IDEs lose to TUIs" there.
If anything, TUIs are the awkward in-between of "human in the loop, but with poor tools" where one side is fully automatic, agents suggesting fixes on issue tracker, and the other is holding-AI's-hand where you review every step one at a time.
I hate trying to copy paste in/out of Claude Code's unnecessarily-cute boxed text input.
Zed's implementation of the agent feedback loop isn't yet as good as Claude Code, but there's nothing inherently IDE-related in the parts that are lacking.
I use the TUI for a lot of agentic stuff that is not necessarily coding, from performing some cloud management commands or just dumb things like "where the hell did I alias vim to nvim?". For those things, having to reach out to the IDE is annoying.
And the way I see the future of coding is that should should be able to code from anywhere, mobile, web, your computer. You already have your code on the cloud (most of the time). Neither TUI or IDE works well currently for that.
