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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

They also started developing Fleet several years back and made a few alpha releases, only to shutter it before it ever was ever fully released for reasons that essentially seemed to boil down to "we want to focus on our core IDEs instead, which didn't really explain what changed. I was interested in Fleet, so at this point I can't help but be skeptical of anything new they've done since then because it's not clear to me why the same logic for discontinuing Fleet couldn't apply to pretty much anything else.

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Fleet was tragic. I was so excited for it but it was a perpetual WIP.

I suppose they were in a tough spot regardless though. They started developing it before the AI age, so they would have to pivot either way.

I even forgot that it exist. I tried it many times but it was not good enough. Eventually I switched to Zed since that was better. Probably Zed killed it.

To my knowledge, fleet is Air. They just renamed it and started adding more AI centric workflows.

You're right, AFAIK.

Huh, I went back to look at the announcement of halting development on Fleet, and they went back and updated it six months after the fact to announce the rebrand. It never occurred to me to go back and look.

Many of the improvements and refreshed design were "backported" into the traditional IDEs.

And fleet was made to attract the VSCode generation, who they were starting to lose new user momentum to. But VSCode is no longer the biggest threat.

> Many of the improvements and refreshed design were "backported" into the traditional IDEs.

Okay, but what stops any of that for happening for any of the new things since then? To me, a large part of the appeal of Fleet was that it wasn't the entire IDE; adding a new skin to something that feels much too heavyweight for me does not resolve the fundamental problems I had with it.

Oh, I agree it's not ideal. But the kind of people who were willing to move to a new IDE are also the people who will now be first to ditch IDEs completely. The people who stuck to their traditional IDEs are likely the ones paying subscriptions.

I actually think they could do something more radical than Fleet today after seeing the (alpha, but impressive in use) ArtCraft apps, and translations like Bun. They could embrace still being the best traditional IDE, translating their trademark intelligence, with a lot of the heaviness removed. The thing that struck me about the ArtCraft apps was how fast and light their interfaces felt compared to the originals.

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