Yet another Hacker News

JetBrains Air: A System of Products for Agentic Software Development

39 points FinnLobsien 1 hour ago 26 comments

giancarlostoro 53 minutes ago | parent

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.

tedggh 45 minutes ago | parent

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.

the__alchemist 31 minutes ago | parent

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.

darkwi11ow 24 minutes ago | parent

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

GordonS 3 minutes ago | parent

I use Rider and DataGrip regularly. I also use WriterCide,

DataGrip is seriously under-rated, IMO.

dude250711 52 minutes ago | parent

I am unlikely to renew my ReSharper licence without at least a 75% discount:

- 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- Touching code manually is outdated by agents anyway.

spockz 48 minutes ago | parent

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

hmokiguess 49 minutes ago | parent

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.

fidotron 45 minutes ago | parent

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.

delbronski 41 minutes ago | parent

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.

the__alchemist 32 minutes ago | parent

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.

ookblah 30 minutes ago | parent

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.

darkwi11ow 29 minutes ago | parent

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.

joshstrange 28 minutes ago | parent

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.

dijit 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

foresterre 3 minutes ago | parent

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.

thomascgalvin 18 minutes ago | parent

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

ragebol 24 minutes ago | parent

I want to like this, but not being able to plug this into eg. OpenRouter or a local agent is a bummer.

looperhacks 19 minutes ago | parent

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")

girvo 6 minutes ago | parent

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

throwaw12 22 minutes ago | parent

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

voidfunc 15 minutes ago | parent

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.

chem83 6 minutes ago | parent

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?

fidotron 2 minutes ago | parent

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).

ianhawes 10 minutes ago | parent

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

christkv 7 minutes ago | parent

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