• What's Next?

As of 2026, there are four major forms of agentic coding products:

There are two phases:

1. Transition period (human → agentic coding):
   Editor & IDE + chat side-panel, Coding Agent CLI

   • Editors predates LLM, adding a side-panel is enables AI coding without breaking the classic interface;
   • Coding agent CLIs are first built as an experiment (per Claude Code's creator). Nobody thought it could work this well thus they chose CLI over a GUI because it's easier to build.

2. 🤖 AI-native:
   Collaborative "Digital Coworker" Chat apps, Agent command center apps

   Compared to their predecessors, the focus has shifted to orchestrating agent teams to handle the work from the start.

Among the two AI-native workflows, agent command center apps will likely dominate, for two reasons:

• It is the path that frontier companies like OpenAI/Google/Cursor chose;
• It is more focused on software development, while the AI chat/workspace apps are more generic, and lack basic features like code editing.

For instance, Google launched Antigravity 2.0 at I/O 26' a few days ago, replacing the old VSC-based editor + side panel with an agent-first layout. Cursor 3 took a similar path. The fact that these AI giants are willing to completely redesign their already-popular products, tells you something.

What's Next?

Today, Codex/Cursor/Antigravity look and feel almost identical:

Antigravity 2.0	Codex App	Cursor 3

A natural question is, what's next for agent command center apps? I can think of three directions:

• Proactivity: Can the agent suggest what to do next?
• Team collaboration: This is the strength of chat apps, but a weakness in the above apps. How to deal with context isolation, keep the team productive and in sync, while the code is changing 10x faster?
• Verifiability: Can the agent confidently claim that the code changes work as intended?