Google corporate culture where users are just numbers someone's performance report is why this happens.

Google could easily A/B test half of their users away from their products and nobody would get fired for it

It is the new standard. It sounds awful until you try it, and then you can't go back. But you can still use an IDE as well to edit code by hand and review changes that agents have made.

Yes, this is the standard model for the big frontier models. You don't need Gemini or Claude to do tab completions. A modest size local model can do that just fine. If that is all you are using AI tools for you are wasting money subscribing to Google.

I'm surprised anyone thought Google would stay committed to an IDE product built on Microsoft's VS Code.

This was clearly an experiment or stepping stone, they were never going to stick to this path. It was always going to go away.

This is how they want you to use AI-powered apps. The more ambiguity there is between you and the end result, the likelier you are to keep paying them to avoid friction.

The problem with AI products vs other rent-seeking is that AI is very expensive to build out and run… so they are desperate to push you into relying on it quickly.