Even without AI winter, I don't know how you can catch up to intellij. Vscode is a hodge podge of dubious quality plugins by randos. I'm sure you can build yourself a nice IDE by being very selective, but part of what I'm paying for is the curation and cohesiveness, and I think you need a big player that is invested in building something for a large variety of use cases. I think Microsoft has their own set of tooling that works for them at their company and so does Apple and I'm not sure Google really wants to make a public IDE. Any small scale startup will take many years to catch up.
Microsoft uses a mixture of Visual Studio (classic) and VSCode internally. The AI assistant is Copilot. The exact same stuff that the users use, albeit slightly buggier. To get the True Microsoft Experience, take VSCode, install the Git, GitHub, Azure, Typescript, and Copilot plugins, and disable third-party repos. A cohesive IDE!
> what I'm paying for is the curation and cohesiveness
Seriously. This is where Jetbrains went astray. Their original programmers I think were pretty high quality, but their product people are clearly so pants-on-head clueless that they wouldn't know a golden goose if it crushed them under metric tons of golden eggs. Good things don't power-law scale and "let's make 1000 forked IDEs and 50 really weird infrastructure servers" isn't a winning strategy. It's how you bury yourself in tech debt.
> I'm not sure Google really wants to make a public IDE.
I mean, that's what launched Jetbrains in the first place. Google needed proper development tools for Android and a language more modern than Java at the time to support it. So we got Android Studio and Kotlin. They dumped a bunch of money into them and this is what we got once they started to get more independent.
I was using IntelliJ before Android came along, and Android Studio was Eclipse-based until Android 4.x (and Java-based well after that!). Kotlin was an alternative to Java 1.6, already fairly late, and wasn’t well supported on android until much later. Before ART, Android didn’t even run Kotlin outside of trivial programs because of the dex classfile limit!
