Comparison
Why a new IDE, not a smarter copilot in your old one.
Every PLC vendor is racing to bolt AI onto their existing IDE. Studio 5000 with a side panel. TIA Portal with a chat box. Third-party extensions doing the same. The AI is asked to read and write Structured Text or ladder logic, the same languages frontier models barely speak, because the training distribution doesn't include enough of them.
Koyl took the other path. Build the IDE around the AI loop. Make the source language Python, the language AI is fluent in. Round-trip to the vendor file at export, so the controller still runs what it always ran. The editor, the chat, the simulator, and the parsers live in one tree because that is the only way the AI loop actually closes.
| Dimension | AI bolted on vendor IDE | Vendor's own AI agent | Koyl |
|---|---|---|---|
| Source language the AI reads and writes | Vendor Structured Text or ladder, a tiny slice of LLM training data | Same vendor ST/ladder, same weak distribution | Standard Python: the highest-volume source language in LLM training |
| IDE | Inside the vendor IDE you already tolerate | Inside the vendor IDE | AI-native IDE built around the chat loop. Editor, chat, simulator, parsers in one tree. |
| Existing vendor projects | Edits the vendor file in place, single vendor | Edits the vendor file in place, single vendor | Allen Bradley, Siemens, and Beckhoff parsed losslessly. Edit in Python; export back diff-clean. |
| Cross-vendor work | Not possible. Bound to one vendor's IDE and file format. | Not possible. Vendor's own tooling, vendor's own customers. | Same source. Three vendor targets. One refactor lands everywhere. |
| Verification | Vendor sim if it exists. Slow. Often coupled to hardware. | Vendor sim. Same constraints. | Deterministic scan-cycle simulator. The AI verifies every diff before showing it to you. |
| Testing | Whatever the vendor language ecosystem has, usually nothing | Same story; the vendor language has no test ecosystem | pytest, coverage, CI. AI-written characterization tests pin existing behavior before refactor. |
| Source of truth | The vendor file. Git is bolted on too. | The vendor file. | Your choice: Python or the vendor file. Bidirectional, lossless. |
A chat panel bolted onto someone else's editor can suggest text. It can't drive the simulator. It can't read the IR. It can't verify the diff before showing it to you. The AI loop only closes when the editor, the chat, the simulator, and the parsers all live in one place. That is the IDE we built.
Choosing Python means the IDE inherits the dev-tool ecosystem too. pytest, coverage, every Python language server, every linter and formatter; all of it works inside Koyl, because the source is Python. We didn't build that ecosystem; we tuned it for industrial code.
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