Do full IDEs still deserve a seat at the table in the AI era?
A friend of mine canceled his Visual Studio Enterprise subscription in January. He had been using it for years, built multiple production .NET systems in it, and genuinely valued the tooling. But he had spent the last six months doing almost all of his coding inside VS Code with GitHub Copilot Agent Mode, and he could not justify the renewal.
Three weeks later, a background service in production started leaking memory. He tried everything in his VS Code setup: logging, diagnostic analyzers, heap dumps through the CLI. Nothing gave him a clear picture. He reinstated his Enterprise license, opened the Performance Profiler with .NET Object Allocation Tracking, identified the leak in twenty minutes, and fixed it in ten. Then he went back to VS Code for everything else.
That story is the honest version of the IDE question in 2026. Not whether full IDEs are dead, and not whether they remain the default. The real question is sharper: for which roles, which tasks, and which codebases do they still provide capabilities that AI-powered editors cannot replicate? And when you look at the full picture, including what comes bundled with a Visual Studio subscription beyond the IDE itself, the analysis is more nuanced than either side of the debate usually admits.