Pulsar brings a coding-first IDE to Pharo as generative agents rise
Pulsar at ESUG 2026 (new Smalltalk IDE)
At ESUG 2026, Esteban Lorenzano presented Pulsar, a new coding-first IDE for Pharo. The talk argues that programming tools should help developers understand, navigate, and change the system while staying close to the code — capabilities that generative agents make more important, not less. Pulsar is still a work in progress but already usable, and the slides and video are online.
Generative tools can certainly help, but I do not think they make those capabilities less important. If anything, they make them more important.