I like JetBrains as a company, their pricing for individuals made a lot of sense, you buy the license and you can keep using perpetual license for that version, if you want to buy newer version, you pay slightly less than year before.
I want them to succeed, but can't see how they can win in this agentic world, where people are barely opening their IDEs, and living in agents terminal whole day and from time to time opening a PR to get a review
I'm realizing I am a minority, but my IDE is becoming MORE valuable to me, not less, with LLMs.
The volume of code is only increasing. Problems that used to be solved with a few lines (or even removing lines) are now solved with changes across 10 different files.
My IDE is invaluable for me when trying to navigate this stuff. I am completely convinced that people reviewing LLM code only via PR diffs are consistently missing massive systemic issues. You *need* to review changes in context of the surrounding code.
And doing this without an IDE is just making your life harder for no reason.
Agree, and I have been an Ultimate Edition license holder since like 2013.
I have opened an IDE for very very few things in the last 9 months or so. Im still renewing a license at this point mostly because I like JetBrains the company and it's not a financial burden but they are in a bad place.
If their revenue-generating products are not doing so hot, I wonder what that means to projects such as Kotlin and Compose Multiplatform. Will they keep the lights on?
The whole "multiplatform" portability business has been one of the most conspicuous victims of the agent wave. Porting is now primarily a QA exercise, not a development one. (Development too, generally, is heading that way).
We not only are opening our IDEs, the alternative are iPaaS products like Workato, Boomi, Opal, Sitecore AI, Power Platform,... which are IDEs in their own way, the revenge of 4 GLs.
I have Ghostty with Claude open with one tab per project. Then I have IntelliJ open also with one tab per project.
I find this setup works great for actually participating in the development. To understand what is happening and keep the mental model of what the project is about. Review in progress work in IntelliJ, use the Git, Database and REST(.http files) in the IDE as the agents generate the code.
I don't see a problem with this setup is it really that uncommon? Have people stopped using TOOLS completely? That said I don't have much interest in these JetBrains AI products, at least not currently.
I’ll try this out but after over a decade as a paid JetBrains customer I’ve been looking at the door. I still love their IDE and moving around the code in it but the IDE uses way too many resources. Even with me excluding the worktrees folder it gets stuck indexing/processing when I spin up new worktrees to the point that I’ve found myself killing IDEA regularly to regain system resources. 99% of my work happens in the terminal now and JetBrains has been very slow to adapt. If I get one more “can’t checkout branch, it’s checked out in a worktree” error I’m going to lose my mind, give me an auto-heal option or something. This is how work is done, don’t make me leave your IDE to fix it myself on the cli.
I’ll try out Air but I don’t have high hopes, my current workflows work great and I’m still not sold on what Air offers even after reading this post and the page about Air.
I tend to feel fine with IDEs using buckets of resources, after all: they are specialist tools.
But I have been using their jetbrains remote system, and you can clearly see how incredibly high the RAM usage is on both server and client.
Personally I am also looking at the door, but not because of the resource usage… but because they keep putting resources into things which aren’t their core offering and it makes me wonder if they have run out of innovation in that area.
… then again, they did recently figure out how to make development on a Windows remote work… so I can keep using my linux machine while developing Windows software, so I think that earned a lot of goodwill from me.
I find I still use the paid IDE's (RustRover and WebStorm), even when using LLM's for reviewing code and applying corrections. It's often just faster to do that, especially with an IDE which allows for quick non linear navigation through the files (following functions etc.). I think this is where JetBrain's IDE's excel. I can live with the high startup cost as long as it is quick afterwards.
I do feel however they have been neglecting anything non-AI for a while now. I in particular loved their auto complete, and with the new guesswork AI auto complete it's just not the same. I want deterministic behaviour from my IDE.
On the LLM side, I couldn't use the Anthropic subscription with their offerings, so I just use it from a harness outside the IDE, and switch to the IDE for review. This may not be JB's fault, but it still makes their offering useless to me.
I may be one of the few remaining but I also still program myself sometimes (I weigh it based on the task). The IDE has been pushing so much AI it has been getting in my way sometimes, and it is definitely using more resources for stuff I don't use.
I too am on the fence on whether I'll resume my subscription. Luckily for JB I dearly dislike VSCode's code navigation and interface, and would severely miss their debugging tools integration.
IntelliJ was the perfect IDE ... two years ago maybe? Very little that has been added since improved my experience, a bunch of it gets in my way, and I'm sick of being prompted to try the latest and greatest AI integrations.
I don't think that there's a better alternative at the moment, and I get the need to pump out features to keep the revenue stream going, but I miss the slimmer versions
Semi-OT, but does anyone here know what exactly happened at JetBrains?
Their IDEs have been nosediving for years now in a way usually reserved to "has been acquired by private equity". But they have not been acquired by private equity as far as I can tell.
I'm writing this from my laptop, where each keypress in a .md file in WebStorm makes the fan spin up (not hyperbole).
They invested effort into their VSCode alternative, then even before releasing that as a product, pivoted to building out their AI agent harnessing, then even when that didn't pick up they spent time building this IDE to copy what Cursor does.
For the IDE I pay the releases have been lackluster, updating libraries supported, minor bug fixes, no improvement of performance or usability.
Instead of doubling down on what they did best, they followed the trend (badly) and then will wonder "where have all our devout customers gone".
I’ve been a happy paying JetBrains customer for 10+ years. This year I decided not to renew. It’s just not worth it anymore. I don’t spend as much time as i used to in an IDE. And their AI offerings are not so great. I gave Junie a solid try, but it was always too far behind the competition. I gave Air a solid try, but it was full of bugs. I wish them the best, and I hope they can find a solid product again in this new era.
I think it makes total sense for JetBrains, and a bet on multi-vendor is something that speaks sanity to me. JetBrains has never talked VC bull**t and I'm glad they are not losing their minds for AI
people need to stop trying to build the same walled gardens with these development environments. nobody has time to buy in at this point or try to grok what your specific vision of "agentic development" is.
They need to fix how their AI Chat works.
I could not for the life of me get it to edit files when using a local model with LM studio. It gave me the correct code to change. There is no Code mode when connecting to LM studio with a local model.
I couldn't find how to change the mode without it trying to use Junie, or claude etc. very frustrating.
Is anyone using any of JetBrains AI offerings? I feel like they are burning piles of money on areas I never hear anyone talking about using. The only thing I ever used was their AI plugin, tried Junie once, but the rest just seems like noise I dont care about.
Rider was my IDE for years until they started pushing their AI tools while not letting you bring your own models. Then it seems they listened to the complaints and for a while I could use Codex but then the next update took it away. So I ran out of patience and switched to VS Code, and that was the end of JB and my dear Rider for me.
PyCharm and RustRover. It is astonishing no other IDEs have offered direct competition. I would prefer a faster/lighter alternative to my tablet, but none exists.
edit: Sorry; misread. No, and I am very confused by their diaspora of AI offerings!
Imo vscod(ium) with pyrefly LSP is miles better than Pycharm today. Never used rust rover but rust-analyser LSP also worked great for me. Interesting which features of jetbrains IDEs do sell it for you
I don't have a good direct comparison to that, but broadly:
- Natural treatment of multi-file projects
- Introspection
- Refactoring
- Keyboard shortcuts, specific types of search etc
- The build/run windows
Overall, it feels like JB treats the core units as languages and multi-file projects, while others, including VsCode, treat it as text files. Whenever I try something else, I look for these features, assume I'm doing something wrong, then come to an understanding that no one else does them to the same degree. For example, Zed has no concept of moving items. I don't know if VsCode does, but whenever I try that, it seems to have only superficial ability to introspect on function calls, data structures etc.
The problem all these products have is these blog posts that describe in enough detail what the patterns are, out of necessity, also provide the information for the product to be cloned into a form that is then more dynamic and malleable for use by other developers.
It's clearly existential for JetBrains, and it's revealing that the opening goes for the fear with "but it hasn’t changed what it costs to be wrong" while ignoring that this hasn't exactly been a major concern for most software people for a scarily long time, including JetBrains themselves.
I stopped using them last year. They were too late to see the AI juggernaut coming and their attempts at responding have been underwhelming. They should have been pouring resources into Fleet from 2022 onwards to make this, but instead it's been a series of missteps. This looks like approximately the right offering, but where's the moat? It seems like just another Cursor/Antigravity.
I wasn't able to integrate Air into my workflow on my first attempt. I'd hoped it would unify Claude and OpenAI, but Claude doesn't let you use it unless you are on the Token plan, which IIRC only makes sense for enterprises. I did not see any immediate advantages in Air over the Codex application, but will try it again in a few months.
I still love RustRover and PyCharm! Switching to anything else would be a big downgrade.
Side note: I am confused by the various JB LLM integrations. Air, Junie, at least 1 (maybe 2 more?) the IDEas have suggested I try.
They have to rapidly pivot into AI because their IDEs will soon no longer be needed because less and less people are writing code by hand but I don't think it will be successful.
Refactoring when you know the shortcuts and what you want to do is still significantly faster and less error prone than letting an llm do it. That is why I started semedit[0], to bring semantically editing to LLMs. I’m still working on the benchmarking harness but the first results where I get the llm to actually use the tools look promising.
Just yesterday tried Intellij ai assistant setup and it sucks. I mainly use Cursor but also have Codex sub, and since version 3.15 Cursor made changes that nerfed Codex experience inside IDE, so I reluctantly look for replacement that could allow me to use both from a single interface. Intellij kinda allows for that unified interface, but is very prototype-y quality, missing features from both Cursor and Codex, can not import historical conversations and their auth UX is meh. Not sure if they will be able to catch up to competition from there.
I want them to succeed, but can't see how they can win in this agentic world, where people are barely opening their IDEs, and living in agents terminal whole day and from time to time opening a PR to get a review
The volume of code is only increasing. Problems that used to be solved with a few lines (or even removing lines) are now solved with changes across 10 different files.
My IDE is invaluable for me when trying to navigate this stuff. I am completely convinced that people reviewing LLM code only via PR diffs are consistently missing massive systemic issues. You *need* to review changes in context of the surrounding code.
And doing this without an IDE is just making your life harder for no reason.
I have opened an IDE for very very few things in the last 9 months or so. Im still renewing a license at this point mostly because I like JetBrains the company and it's not a financial burden but they are in a bad place.
I find this setup works great for actually participating in the development. To understand what is happening and keep the mental model of what the project is about. Review in progress work in IntelliJ, use the Git, Database and REST(.http files) in the IDE as the agents generate the code.
I don't see a problem with this setup is it really that uncommon? Have people stopped using TOOLS completely? That said I don't have much interest in these JetBrains AI products, at least not currently.
I’ll try out Air but I don’t have high hopes, my current workflows work great and I’m still not sold on what Air offers even after reading this post and the page about Air.
But I have been using their jetbrains remote system, and you can clearly see how incredibly high the RAM usage is on both server and client.
Personally I am also looking at the door, but not because of the resource usage… but because they keep putting resources into things which aren’t their core offering and it makes me wonder if they have run out of innovation in that area.
… then again, they did recently figure out how to make development on a Windows remote work… so I can keep using my linux machine while developing Windows software, so I think that earned a lot of goodwill from me.
I do feel however they have been neglecting anything non-AI for a while now. I in particular loved their auto complete, and with the new guesswork AI auto complete it's just not the same. I want deterministic behaviour from my IDE.
On the LLM side, I couldn't use the Anthropic subscription with their offerings, so I just use it from a harness outside the IDE, and switch to the IDE for review. This may not be JB's fault, but it still makes their offering useless to me.
I may be one of the few remaining but I also still program myself sometimes (I weigh it based on the task). The IDE has been pushing so much AI it has been getting in my way sometimes, and it is definitely using more resources for stuff I don't use.
I too am on the fence on whether I'll resume my subscription. Luckily for JB I dearly dislike VSCode's code navigation and interface, and would severely miss their debugging tools integration.
I don't think that there's a better alternative at the moment, and I get the need to pump out features to keep the revenue stream going, but I miss the slimmer versions
Their IDEs have been nosediving for years now in a way usually reserved to "has been acquired by private equity". But they have not been acquired by private equity as far as I can tell.
I'm writing this from my laptop, where each keypress in a .md file in WebStorm makes the fan spin up (not hyperbole).
What happened, JetBrains?
For the IDE I pay the releases have been lackluster, updating libraries supported, minor bug fixes, no improvement of performance or usability.
Instead of doubling down on what they did best, they followed the trend (badly) and then will wonder "where have all our devout customers gone".
I couldn't find how to change the mode without it trying to use Junie, or claude etc. very frustrating.
DataGrip is seriously under-rated, IMO.
edit: Sorry; misread. No, and I am very confused by their diaspora of AI offerings!
Two things that fell short for me:
1. No support for my Claude subscription
2. The git interface lags behind other JetBrains IDEs
It's clearly existential for JetBrains, and it's revealing that the opening goes for the fear with "but it hasn’t changed what it costs to be wrong" while ignoring that this hasn't exactly been a major concern for most software people for a scarily long time, including JetBrains themselves.
I still love RustRover and PyCharm! Switching to anything else would be a big downgrade.
Side note: I am confused by the various JB LLM integrations. Air, Junie, at least 1 (maybe 2 more?) the IDEas have suggested I try.
It's not bundled with the IDEs but it's available on github
- It sees very little investment ever since they introduced Rider.
- They give out VS Code one for free, yet the VS users are neglected.
- Touching code manually is outdated by agents anyway.
[0]: https://github.com/spockz/semantic-editor