Blog · Posted on Oct 27, 2026 by Michael Sjöberg · View as Markdown

IDEs are dead. Long live the text editor.

It might seem like a strange time to build a traditional text editor.

AI agents are getting better at writing code, and most editors seem to be moving towards becoming complete AI development environments.

That's Kirill Skrygan, CEO of JetBrains, saying they're transforming their IDEs into ADEs, presumably meaning Agent Development Environments.

I am going in a slightly different direction with Peeknext.

I use AI extensively myself, almost hourly, and I think agents are changing software development in some pretty fundamental ways.

But I am not convinced that every text editor needs to become an AI editor.

For a long time, development environments have been getting more complicated. Language servers, build systems, debuggers, extensions, code completion, refactoring tools, and now AI agents.

JetBrains CLion takes up 5.3 GB on my Mac. That's approaching the size of some local AI models.

I think much of what traditionally required dedicated IDE features can now be handled by an AI model instead.

Peeknext is about 150 MB, with everything included. Perhaps AI will make development environments smaller, rather than larger?

There is something useful about typing out a function, moving things around, and figuring out how everything fits together. It is not always the fastest way to produce code, but sometimes that is not the point.

I think writing code is also a way of understanding it.

This is partly why I have been focusing so much on editing performance in Peeknext. I want typing, scrolling, searching, and navigating to feel immediate.

There is already a terminal and plenty of external tools for building, testing, debugging, and generating code. I don't see much value in recreating all of them inside Peeknext.

I'm not against AI integration. Peeknext already has some local AI features, and I'll probably add more. But I don't want AI to become the center of the editor.

My goal is to build a really good text editor, not an entire development environment.