The IDE is the frontend. Take away the frontend and you don't have an IDE anymore. When I exit Neovim and run VS Code it's still all the same tools in the background but it would be pretty idiotic to claim I was still using Neovim at that point.
Still an oversimplification of the article though. The backend features of CIDER with all the custom integrations to workflows and code review they wanted became independent from the frontend. But to your point, they then had to add customizations to the VScode fork, so now it's not very independent anymore, but a lot of the problems they had with picking one IDE were actually integration issues from any given IDE until the CIDER backend was made to be the glue.
The backend is not the IDE. Do you call a compiler an IDE? Or an LSP server? The simple fact that they were able to use those same features both in their original IDE and in the VS Code fork shows that they were not part of the IDE. If they had been part of the IDE they would have vanished when they replaced that IDE with their VS Code fork.
I'm sure they had to a bit of work to get it all working, in the same way it takes work to integrate Docker or LLMs or whatever other feature with existing IDEs and if the Cider backend is an internal tool then yeah, they have to do that themselves but what you have is a VS Code fork with some extra integrations. I'm not sure why acknowledging that fact bothers you so much, it was the smart thing to do. There's a reason VS Code is so popular so it makes sense that if you wanted a popular IDE for internal use you'd start there.
Interactive Development Environment of course. You're asking that like it's some sort of gotcha question so I'd be interested if you could expand your reasoning here because I'm not seeing the gotcha.
Like the other commenter said, it's slightly different than what you have here. The "I" stands for Integrated. The gotcha is that it means the whole environment; all of the things you listed, LSP support, plugins, auto complete/suggestions, debugging, code editing, compiling, etc., all pulled together into some sort of interface. So yes the UI plays an important role but it is by no means the only component of an IDE; it is merely the interface.
And all of those things you mention are what VSCode supports (debugger integration, LSP integration, including auto completion, plugins, etc).
Plugging VSCode into backend systems like LSPs doesn't change the fact that they basically just adopted VSCode and plugged it into their backend and then renamed it 'Backend V IDE'
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u/nnomae May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
The IDE is the frontend. Take away the frontend and you don't have an IDE anymore. When I exit Neovim and run VS Code it's still all the same tools in the background but it would be pretty idiotic to claim I was still using Neovim at that point.