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.

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 only IDE that compares in my eyes is Visual Studio, which to outsiders might seem weird, but when they support something they do a pretty good job.

As far as I know, you don't need DataGrip if you already have Rider. The same functionality is already inside Rider.

I mean, I use DataGrip, but their AI specific tools is what I'm wondering about.

I use Junie at work and I have to say I'm not amazed by it. Plus I cannot run it inside an Alpine Linux VM which is annoying as all the other agents I tried worked just fine.

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.

[0]: https://github.com/spockz/semantic-editor

I would love to see JetBrains win, I like them as a business, though unfortunately I haven't been using their products in a long time now.

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’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 could def go for some ACP RN.

JetBrainer here. You're right about the Claude terms of use issue.

About compared with Codex, we have some tricks up our sleeve that are actually valuable for the target market we're going after: folks that want to understand and own what they've done. Watch for the videos we'll be doing (and look for my shining face in the PyCharm channel.)

On the last point...yes, the downside of choice is choice.

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.

Hey few things that are deal breakers for me (I tried Intellij IDEA community edition, AI assistant)

1) Import of historical data from agents. I often look up past agent sessions and require search into them as a primary feature of the harness. I know for a fact that historical conversations are not encrypted for both Codex and Cursor on a local filesystem, so Intellij tool could import them into ai assistance plugin even before user is authenticated with either Cursor or Codex. There are few annoying things in search for both Cursor and Codex extensions, so having great search over past conversations could be a great introductory feature

2) Auth .. I am not sure about this one technically because I haven't looked myself into how agent auth is done for Cursor and Codex, but at least for Codex, their IDE extension for vscodium/cursor/zed/etc. is able to use existing authentication from the CLI codex tool, so I do not need to login into every new IDE I try Codex extension in. With Intellij Codex auth did not work at all for me.

3) Cursor authentication worked, though I needed second one for Intellij while being logged in with CLI, but the model reasoning level is not selectable from within ai assistant, one more deal breaker for me unfortunately (I found it stays like this for a long time: https://forum.cursor.com/t/intellij-cursor-acp-reasoning-lev...)

I couldn't use the Anthropic subscription with their offerings

We tried to make this work, but unfortunately hit a hard stop with Anthropic: their current policies do not allow us to support this integration :c

We still hope to resolve this in the future

JetBrainer here. For both this comment and the parent...I get you. It feels like the whole industry has gotten sucked into this vortex where people don't even look at code anymore.

I'm happy about our Air launch because we're being AI "realists"...neither too much sunshine pumping nor too much skeptic. We're doubling down on developers and development, both when you type and when you don't.

On to the point..I can promise the PyCharm is doing some pretty massive non-AI stuff on the deterministic side. I think determinism is the best path to trusting the code generated by the box.

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

Yes, it’s because I’m writing less code by hand. I mostly use IDEA now to navigate/review the code or do my own debugging/tracing. My time in the IDE has fallen drastically which is why the high ram/cpu usage when I’m not even “using” the ide are so frustrating, especially since I’ve excluded the nested worktrees parent folder (.claude/worktrees). I can handle IDEA being dumb when it comes to worktrees, I can’t handle it locking up after I’ve told it to ignore them.

I know harnesses (and harness harnesses) have a long way to go and lots of improvements even without models getting “smarter”, I’m rooting for JetBrains but so far IDEA has been more of hindrance in the LLM-era. The CLI TUI’s have become the most important tool I have and the GUI versions haven’t kept pace.

I’d love to live in IDEA instead of the CLI but so far I’ve found that to be too limiting and not as adaptable to our rapidly changing field. Maybe Air will help with that, we will see.

I want something like herdr in IDEA, a way to monitor agents, smart worktree integration, easily visualize changes and use the power of the InteliJ brains to assist in coding (lint/checks/etc).

Right now my IDE gets more in my way than assists me in shipping code.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but isn't a sizeable part of the article about how Air can be used with any agent (section "The future is multi-vendor")

It supports ACP, so you can use it with any ACP speaking harness including many that would work with local agents

Yes, as others replied, just plug in an agent with a model config pointed at OpenRouter. I do this all the time with OpenCode and Pi. Give me a reply if I can help you on this.

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).

JetBrainer here. Thanks for the loyalty, and I do think as one of the last independents, we are worth cheering for. But it's up to us to earn double-clicking on the IDE icon.

After using Air in PyCharm, it's some good stuff. It's re-imagined for this hybrid world. But my question for you, honest question: do you think you still want to look at code? How about write code? If so, what are some things you'd do, if you were in charge of our IDEs?

I use their MCP to give agents reliable refactor/rename, find usages, etc.

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.

Sure, but my IDE does these simple things very well.

Just some important things off the top of my head that I use daily:

* Instantly jumping between definitions and usages

* Folding and unfolding code blocks

* Quick overview of structures in files

* Database access, so I can browse the data and the code at the same time

Also, sometimes I just want to quickly refactor/rename some variable across all its usages or whatever. It's just quicker to do it in the IDE with a simple keyboard shortcut, rather than prompting an agent "rename oldName to newName".

JetBrainer here. I can attest that you are a primary target for Air for IDEs.

We have put a lot of thought into how we can add value for the workflow you just described. Here's the way I think about it: FSD for a car. Can you imagine trying to sell a car without a steering wheel? I still want to code, I still want the deterministic side, even in cases where I'm letting the machine do the work.

I'd agree with this. I've been working with Claude on an app. I wanted to increase the size of one element in the UI. I could have asked Claude to do it, but I wanted to understand the application, as well as it kinda seemed like a waste of time and tokens.

much more than _writing_ code. It's about code reviews, QA, debugging, discovery, and maintenance;

Of course, but agents are also opening up new possibilities to do these jobs.

For example, you can do quick first code review with agent, or you can ask agent to add couple of print statements and debug the code until it figures out the issue, also for discovery, you can do discovery with agents and generate nice output with the details you want (although not accurate sometimes)

As a JetBrains user myself, whose organization cancelled the IntelliJ license recently, I can attest things I am doing inside IntelliJ is getting less and less. I am primarily using IntelliJ for code navigation at the moment, which is still the best one

Hi, JetBrainer here with my two cents. You're right, there's a crop of folks barely opening their IDE, who don't really even want to look at code anymore, much less type any code.

But there's still a group that needs to own the result, who still read code and write code. Folks who still believe in developers and development. This group might not be loud in SV, but they are big out in the world.

I'm a Python advocate at JetBrains and our team runs into folks like this all the time.

I've been enjoying using Air inside the IDE as a way to get the acceleration without giving up coding. I get the speed side from the agent and the trust side from the deterministic IDE.

Highly recommend SoloTerm, which I think this kind of tries to replicate.

I still pay for it but it’s getting harder to justify spending on it.

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.

Hi, on this, I can promise (as a daily user) that our OpenCode and Pi support are really good. And with those, it's really easy to connect to LM Studio...in fact, I did this for the DeepLearning.AI course on hybrid/local models.

Follow-up question:

What else can one use?

Excluding VSCode and all those AI-first IDEs I mean. JetBrains' git features have been excellent. I have not yet seen them be reproduced anywhere, but, eventually, they will kill that classic UI plugin. :(

Haven't you noticed how their nosediving started right around another significant event of the past few years?

Most development was done in Russia (disregard tales sold to the West about them supposedly being a Czech company, they were Czech mostly in the name, real work happened elsewhere). Exited Russia in the beginning of 2022, leaving many talented people behind: not everyone wanted or could leave because of families, obligations, personal beliefs.

Remembering where most of JB's money was coming from, can't really say they had a choice.

Want me to look through it with you?

Honestly not really.

I mean I am happy that there is some kind of response, but this is just damage control.

And, frankly, you do not need me to fix that. Of that I am certain.

I'm not running any weird setups or something out of the ordinary. If you actually test your software on a normal computer (think: random thinkpad with 8th gen intel cpu), running some random boring linux distribution (think: debian) you will run into these problems.

The bad experiences all so far have been smoke-test-level issues.

Or.. well. Product strategy. Not even bugs at all.

__

But, yeah, you had to say something. I understand that, given your role as "developer advocate" (as per the HN account about section). This is your job after all.

But, honestly, sticking ones head in the sand and hoping that this passes might've been the strategically more wise move.

The problems your employer has cannot be fixed by one person taking their time and looking at an individual issue some other vocal guy on the web has. I think we both know that.

I'm sorry, genuinely.

Hi, product person from JetBrains here:

About point 1: We tried to make this work, but unfortunately hit a hard stop with Anthropic: their current policies do not allow us to support this integration, and we were not able to negotiate an exception :c

We still hope that we will find an agreement here

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 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

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.

This is like a 3rd or fourth Jetbrains product named Air

I've been paying customer for 15+ years, I wish I can continue using them another 15 years, but the current trend is terrible.

They had the best IDE. Now they went all into AI, trying to compete on another people's field, and the cost of that is diminishing their main product. Do they really want to compete with Anthropic? Instead of that they could improve the other sides of IDE. Even with AI I have to review the code. Especially with AI. I need tools to check the diffs, I need to refactor it, I need to run it in different ways, see how it works, and so on. That's where IntelliJ could shine, not as AI tool.

JetBrains is on track to become another Nokia.