Many years later, as he watched an AI build and debug a mobile app from a TTY terminal, the former IBMer would remember that distant afternoon when he entered his fourteenth consecutive day configuring a React Native development environment in Eclipse.
This is the story about code typing. It all started from — forget the punch tape — the keyboard.
Fingers on keys, eyes on screen. The first programmers typed into the void and the void typed back in blinking green.
Then came the editor wars. Vi saved every keystroke like the world was ending. Emacs consumed every keystroke like it was building one. Neither side won. Both sides are still fighting.
Then the GUI arrived and promised to save us from typing. Eclipse rose as king — launch everything from one place, they said at IBM. And they meant it. You didn't just code inside Eclipse. You coded Eclipse itself. Plugins became the language. Plugins became the culture. A plugin to manage your plugins. A team whose entire job was writing plugins for other teams' plugins. The platform had eaten its own builders, and the builders called it architecture. The snake ate itself, and was satisfied.
It was magnificent. It was also four gigabytes and a five-minute startup time, held together by dependency trees nobody fully understood, maintained by teams that no longer existed.
IntelliJ watched all of this and made the opposite bet. Opinionated. Integrated. Fast enough to think in. It charged money and people paid, gladly, just to escape. Eclipse didn't fall — it was abandoned, one migration at a time, until there was nothing left to abandon.
Then VS Code arrived and rewrote the terms again. Free. Fast. An extension protocol so clean that the whole community poured in overnight. Not an IDE — an editor that knew its place, and grew into everything else. It isn't dead. It may never die. It is, at this moment, open in ten million windows.
And then Electron. The dream was honest: build desktop apps with web technology, ship everywhere. It worked. Slack worked. VS Code itself worked. But then came the imitators — a hundred apps that were just websites nailed to a window frame, each carrying a full Chromium instance like a sailor carries an anchor.
How many RAMs must an IDE eat up, before you call it garbage?
The answer, my friend, is still loading.
So we fled back to the terminal. Vim. Neovim. A text file and a thought.
And then, quietly, they came.
Aider, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini, Claude — different voices, the same instinct. Not a trend. Not a product cycle. Something older than that. The industry, without agreeing to, had remembered something it once knew: that the terminal was never primitive. It was just waiting for the other side to get smart enough.
The tide doesn't ask permission. It just comes in.
And then one day, something in the terminal typed back.
Not green phosphor. Not a compiler error. Something that understood.
Neo, is that you?
The former IBMer looked at the screen.
And it supplies plugins.
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