On the one hand, it's good that we're seeing a lot of exploration in this space. On the other, the trend seems to be everyone developing a million disparate tools that largely replicate the same functionality with the primary variation being greater-or-lesser lock-in to a particular set of services. This is about the third tool this week I've taken a quick look at and thought "I don't see what this offers me that I d…
Not tied to VSCode is a big one for me. This one is agnostic. Continue.dev has some features, but it’s on VSCode and Jetbrains
That said, VSCode is a popular platform for this for exactly the reason I think consolidation is eventually inevitable: it's got a huge preexisting ecosystem. There are extensions for practically anything you could ask for.
There's likely room for some standalone, focused apps in this space. I just don't see the current wave of "we put a wrapper around Claude Code and gave it some basic MCP and custom prompt management tools like a dozen other applications this week" being sustainable.
They're all going to end up on their own tiny islands unless there's a reason for an ecosystem to develop around them.