Two reinforcing flywheels are accelerating AI IDE (integrated development environment) adoption: 1. Model-product flywheel: As foundation models improve (reasoning, planning, tool use), AI IDEs built on top of them instantly get better, driving more product usage. As AI IDEs become major token consumers, foundation model providers are incentivized to optimize for those workflows — further increasing performance. 2. User-data flywheel: As AI IDEs attract more developers, they generate proprietary usage data (what devs ask, how they code, where they get stuck). This data can be used to train specialized models fine-tuned for the IDE itself — leading to better UX and performance, and a deeper moat. #1 benefits the category. #2 benefits the category leader.