For
decades, opening the IDE was a way of saying “I’m getting to work.” There it was – the objects, the code, the debugging tools, and the button to build or run.
For
those of us who work with GeneXus, it was also the place where we described the business and built our Knowledge Base.

Today, in conversations about development, the idea of the “end of IDEs” comes up more and more. I understand where it comes from: we can explain to an agent what we want to achieve and let it consult the project, propose and implement changes, execute operations, and return a result for us to review. A part of the work we used to do step by step inside the IDE is starting to happen through that conversation.

Michael Truell, co-founder of Cursor, describes this journey as a third era of AI-driven development. First came autocomplete; then agents we moved forward with through successive instructions and responses. Now come agents capable of handling longer tasks with greater independence. In that vision, the developer devotes more attention to defining the problem, setting direction, and reviewing the work produced.

Cursor’s own evolution shows how the tool changes alongside that way of working. Cursor 3 organizes its new interface around agents, combines local and cloud-based work, and retains access to the IDE. The editor, code navigation, and change review still have a place within an environment that now encompasses more activities. Development is shifting its center.

Anthropic is also bringing Claude Code to the terminal and the IDE. Agentic work can start and continue across different interfaces, depending on the task and how we want to be involved. These examples help explain what lies behind the conversation about the future of IDEs: we can increasingly do more without a single tool concentrating the entire process.

For
GeneXus, this connects to an idea developed in “GeneXus and the Power of Knowledge“: technologies and interfaces change, and at the same time, business knowledge evolves. The rules, data, relationships, and decisions that explain a system have a much longer lifespan than the tool from which we edit them.

When a growing portion of the work is delegated to an agent, our relationship with the tool that once concentrated almost all activity changes. We spend more time explaining objectives, resolving questions, and evaluating results. The IDE occupies a different place in that journey and remains valuable for working directly on the system, understanding it, and reviewing its changes.

That is why we will continue with GeneXus 18 and its IDE on Windows. It is the environment our clients work with today and will remain part of our offering for creating and evolving their applications. At the same time, the focus of this new stage is shifting toward how to work with knowledge through agents.

As a result, opening access to GeneXus knowledge and its operations for agents becomes more important. The ability to interact from different environments also comes to rely on that connection between the agent and the platform.

For
those who already use GeneXus, this direction builds on something they know well: the Knowledge Base where they have captured the rules, data, and relationships of their systems. That is where we focus with GeneXus for Agents. Through skills, CLI, and MCP, an agent can learn GeneXus concepts, query the Knowledge Base, and execute operations on it. The conversation becomes another entry point into that knowledge.

The combination of GeneXus 18 with the power of agentic development supported by GeneXus for Agents enables everything from the most basic operations on GeneXus objects to the implementation of sophisticated features that impact groups of objects and functionalities, the ability to easily combine other technologies in developing a solution, and even a complete understanding of a solution with its main entities and functionalities.

This is the direction guiding our decision: concentrating our efforts on the evolution of GeneXus for Agents and its full integration with GeneXus 18. GeneXus 18 continues with its IDE on Windows, while we expand the ways in which humans and agents can work with the Knowledge Base. Our priority is to bring GeneXus knowledge into the agentic way of developing.

So, where does the IDE stand? It remains part of the day-to-day work of those who need it, but it now coexists with new ways of creating, understanding, and maintaining software.

Our clients have spent years building systems and accumulating deep knowledge about their businesses, creating digital assets that are today part of what sets them apart. We want them to be able to explore and leverage that knowledge with GeneXus 18, and to evolve it faster and faster with GeneXus for Agents.

Our focus now is on taking advantage of the possibilities that agents open up, while preserving all that knowledge as a solid foundation for continuing to build reliable enterprise software.

You may also be interested in reading:

GeneXus and the Power of Knowledge

Does GeneXus for Agents Work? Here’s What Its Users Think

GeneXus for Agents: what it is, how it works, and how to get started