Because the ESP8266 can act as an access point or client (or both, though I’ve never tried), it has a number of tools you can use. By default the ESP8266 has it’s own unique AP. I.e. when you ...

The amount of people using the Arduino IDE everyday, ... the article was updated to point to Ivan’s Arduino/esp8266 build instead of Jeroen’s Arduino patch for the esp8266 at arduinesp.com.