It's interesting how Anthropic haven't shipped their own IDE for more vertical integration.
All it would take is implementing their own forked version of VSCode (like Cursor did) and making Claude the default choice.
Obviously I'm simplifying here, but they definitely have the capability to do it.
What cursor has learned, very painfully, is that making a complex gui, even with the help of ai, is a lot fucking harder than a cli tool. Anthropic is wisely staying out of that space and sticking to more basic ui’s like cowork.
There is a LOT of work buried in your statement “all it would take”.
All one has to do is look at the evolution of cursor to confirm my statement. Compare v1 of cursor to v3 and see how much more insanely simplified the ui has become in v3 - it’s essentially a glorified cowork interface now
Is that something anyone wants? It seems like being able to plug into other editors works well. What are the experiences people are trying to get but currently can't build because ACP sucks or whatever?
Claude Code Desktop is as close as I can see them getting as it seems the big bet is that the IDE is on its way out as models improve.
> they definitely have the capability to do it.
You'd think so, but I guess they don't.