You can have an agent loop in your IDE, I don't see why anything makes "IDEs lose to TUIs" there.
If anything, TUIs are the awkward in-between of "human in the loop, but with poor tools" where one side is fully automatic, agents suggesting fixes on issue tracker, and the other is holding-AI's-hand where you review every step one at a time.
I hate trying to copy paste in/out of Claude Code's unnecessarily-cute boxed text input.
Zed's implementation of the agent feedback loop isn't yet as good as Claude Code, but there's nothing inherently IDE-related in the parts that are lacking.
I use the TUI for a lot of agentic stuff that is not necessarily coding, from performing some cloud management commands or just dumb things like "where the hell did I alias vim to nvim?". For those things, having to reach out to the IDE is annoying.
And the way I see the future of coding is that should should be able to code from anywhere, mobile, web, your computer. You already have your code on the cloud (most of the time). Neither TUI or IDE works well currently for that.
If anything, TUIs are the awkward in-between of "human in the loop, but with poor tools" where one side is fully automatic, agents suggesting fixes on issue tracker, and the other is holding-AI's-hand where you review every step one at a time.
I hate trying to copy paste in/out of Claude Code's unnecessarily-cute boxed text input.
Zed's implementation of the agent feedback loop isn't yet as good as Claude Code, but there's nothing inherently IDE-related in the parts that are lacking.
https://zed.dev/docs/ai/agent-panel