From Emacs to Cursor, the end of your IDEs is near

Back to blog

EngineeringMay 26, 2026· 7 min read

From Emacs to Cursor, the end of your IDEs is near

For fifty years, the code editor kept evolving without ever leaving the developer's machine. With agents, that era is ending.

Adrien MaretCTO

On this page

Why we used to code locally

But we don't type the code anymore

What staying local actually costs

A machine that saturates the moment you parallelize

Secrets lying around everywhere

The supply chain attack surface

What comes next

Cloud environments that orchestrate agents

What we're building at Maleus

Conclusion

What comes next

Cloud environments that orchestrate agents

The editor disappears in favor of an interface whose only role is to launch agents, watch their work as it streams, interrupt them and redirect them when they head in the wrong direction.

Each agent runs in its own throwaway sandbox with scoped, revocable credentials, the source code never touches your machine, and npm install happens in the agent's isolated environment rather than yours.

It's exactly the same logic as with a human. When you hire a developer, you don't let them push straight to production: you put in place guardrails, processes, reviews and docs so they can make mistakes within a frame where the error has only a limited business impact. Agents work differently from us, but the problem is exactly the same: they make mistakes, and those mistakes can hit your business. So they too need a dedicated environment that reduces the blast radius of what they break.

There are already early signs of this with Devin, Cursor Background Agents, Codex Cloud or Claude Code running inside GitHub Actions, but they're still positioned as a complement to the local IDE rather than as its replacement.

I think the shift will happen quickly because the pressure comes from both sides at once: developers want to parallelize more tasks while CISOs want to stop seeing API keys and production source code lying around on personal MacBooks that meet no security standard.

What we're building at Maleus

That's precisely the gap we're trying to fill at Maleus, with a cloud dev environment where agents run in isolated sandboxes and you drive everything from the browser, without ever having to open a terminal on your own machine. Concretely, that means:

a cloud dev environment provisioned per project, with its backend, dependencies and runtime managed on the platform side, fully replacing the local setup

strict process isolation where secrets live in the environment and are injected only into the backend process that actually needs them, rather than being exposed on the filesystem or in the shell of every peripheral tool running alongside

a grace period on npm install that prevents a freshly published package from being executed immediately, neutralizing the typical attack window of a compromised supply chain

automatic package updates delegated to a cloud agent that checks diffs and CVEs before applying, rather than a local npm update that blindly trusts the registry

a kernel-level sandbox for each agent, isolating it from the rest of the environment and denying it access to anything it doesn't explicitly need for the current task

code visualization directly in the browser, with diffs and review integrated in the same place as agent orchestration

agent piloting from that same web interface, where you launch an agent, watch it work, interrupt it or redirect it without ever leaving the browser

This is probably the direction the entire dev toolchain will take over the next two years.

The local IDE will survive only for the niche cases where keystroke latency remains critical: game dev, embedded, certain low-level debugging contexts.

Conclusion

The local IDE is an artifact of an era when we typed the code, and that era is no longer ours.

I'm not saying it'll disappear tomorrow, habits take time. The transition will probably happen in steps: first long-running agents in the cloud, then review in the cloud, then everything else.

But it has no structural reason to exist anymore, and it actively worsens the security problems we all have right in front of us without really wanting to look at them.

The dev environment of the next few years will be cloud and multi-agent, and the interface will look more like an orchestrator than an editor.

Which means that the whole "editor + extensions + local linters" value chain is on borrowed time, and that's probably where to build for the years ahead.

See how Maleus can accelerate your team.