Best AI IDEs in the UK

Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is Microsoft’s open-source AI code editor designed to make coding faster, smarter, and more collaborative. It supports thousands of extensions and nearly every programming language, offering developers a lightweight yet powerful environment for writing, testing, and debugging code. With AI-powered features like GitHub Copilot, Next Edit Suggestions, and Agent Mode, VS Code helps you code with precision, automate complex tasks, and streamline development workflows. It integrates seamlessly with cloud services, remote repositories, and tools like Git, Docker, and Azure. The editor is fully customizable, allowing you to personalize your layout, color themes, and keyboard shortcuts. Whether coding locally or in the browser, VS Code delivers a complete development experience for individuals and teams alike.

Cursor is an AI coding agent and development platform for building ambitious software faster. The platform lets developers hand off tasks to agents that can build, test, demo, and prepare features for review. Cursor supports autonomous and parallel agent workflows, including cloud agents that can work on multiple tasks across repositories. It runs across the editor, terminal, Slack, and GitHub, helping teams automate coding, code review, PR workflows, and repetitive engineering work. Cursor also lets users choose from leading AI models for different tasks, including models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, SpaceXAI, and Cursor. Built for developers, engineering teams, and enterprises, Cursor helps accelerate software development while keeping humans focused on decisions and review.

Roo Code is an AI-powered software engineering platform designed to help developers build, debug, and ship code faster. It works directly inside your IDE through a VS Code extension or autonomously in the cloud using AI agents. Roo Code supports multiple AI models and providers, giving developers full flexibility and control. Role-based modes keep AI focused on specific tasks like coding, debugging, testing, or planning. The platform is open source, secure, and transparent by design. Developers can configure workflows to match their exact preferences. Roo Code fits seamlessly into modern development environments for both individuals and teams.

Kiro is an AI‑powered integrated development environment that brings structure to AI‑driven coding by converting natural‑language prompts into clear requirements, system designs, and discrete implementation tasks validated by robust tests. Built from the ground up for agentic workflows, it features spec‑driven development, multimodal chat, “agent hooks” that trigger background tasks on events like file saves, and an autopilot mode that autonomously runs large scripts while keeping you in control. With smart context management, Kiro reduces repetitive prompts and helps implement complex features across large codebases. Native MCP integrations let you connect to documentation, databases, and APIs, and you can guide development with images of UI designs or architecture diagrams. Enterprise‑grade security and privacy ensure safe deployment, while support for Claude Sonnet models, Open VSX plugins, and existing VS Code settings delivers a familiar yet AI‑supercharged experience.

Replit is an AI-powered app development platform that helps users turn ideas into websites, mobile apps, designs, slides, animations, data visualizations, games, documents, and spreadsheets without needing to code manually. The platform features Agent 4, which can interpret prompts, plan requirements, write production-ready code, evolve projects, and publish apps. Replit includes Infinite Canvas for visually exploring and tweaking designs before applying them directly to an app. Parallel Agents let multiple tasks run at once, helping teams build authentication, databases, design, and other features faster. Built-in infrastructure includes authentication, database, hosting, monitoring, AI integrations, and connections to services such as OpenAI, Stripe, and Google Workspace. Built for individuals, teams, and enterprises, Replit helps users prototype, collaborate, launch, and scale software from one workspace.

Lens is a powerful developer-focused platform that brings clarity, visibility, and control to Kubernetes and LLM-powered applications. With over one million users, Lens has become the standard IDE for working with Kubernetes beyond the command line. It provides real-time insights, troubleshooting, and observability directly from a local desktop application. Lens runs securely using your existing credentials and respects RBAC without requiring cloud backends. Developers can move from installation to actionable insights in minutes. The platform is designed around real developer workflows rather than traditional ops tooling. Lens now extends beyond Kubernetes into LLM application development and observability.

Ask questions or generate code with the context of your codebase for accurate results. This also works with choosing specific folders, online docs, terminal content, files, and more. PearAI can directly code in your files, and allow you to see diffs. Try CMD+I (CTRL+I on Windows). Here, we ask PearAI to help us add error handling and comments. Without writing a single line of code, we were able to make a new feature in an unfamiliar codebase: adding a documentation page to the PearAI landing page. Speed up your development process by seamlessly integrating AI into your workflow. PearAI's goal is to reduce the time it takes for an individual to go from idea to creation. Coding itself is a crucial tool in product development, and we believe that with the advancement of AI, it may drastically change over the coming years. We aim to build the environment that will encompass these changes, both in the short-term and long-term.

Eclipse Theia is an extensible platform to develop multi-language Cloud & Desktop IDEs with state-of-the-art web technologies. Not sure whether you need a web or desktop version or both? With Theia you can develop one IDE and run it in browsers or native desktop application from a single source. The Theia project is hosted at the Eclipse Foundation, a not-for-profit corporation, and is developed by a diverse community. Unlike other "open-source" projects, projects hosted at an Open-Source Foundation are protected against single-vendor decisions against the interest of the diverse community. Theia is designed in a modular way to allow extenders and adopters customizing and extending every aspect of it. Composing a custom IDE-like product is as easy as listing all needed extensions in a package.json file. Adding new functionality by implementing your own extensions is easy, too and provides all the flexibility you need.