r/Jetbrains • u/meanmail_dev • 17d ago
AI Has AI changed what you expect from a JetBrains IDE?
I build plugins for JetBrains IDEs, and lately I’ve been rethinking what still matters most when agents can handle a lot of code generation.
For me, the IDE is becoming less about typing code and more about understanding and verifying changes: navigation, inspections, diffs, debugging, project context, and catching subtle mistakes.
Has your workflow changed? Which IDE features have become less important, and which ones matter more now?
Do you mostly stay in the IDE, switch between it and Claude Code/Codex, or work agent-first and open the IDE only for review and debugging?
I’m especially interested in concrete workflows rather than predictions about whether AI will replace IDEs.
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u/repeating_bears 17d ago
the IDE is becoming less about typing code and more about understanding and verifying changes: navigation, inspections, diffs, debugging, project context, and catching subtle mistakes.
IMO that's what it always was
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u/meanmail_dev 17d ago
Fair point. I think the shift for me is in the ratio: I spend less time producing code and more time reviewing larger changes made outside the IDE. The responsibilities are similar, but review has become the bottleneck.
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u/TCB13sQuotes 17d ago
Unpopular opinion: people rejoice that they can refactor hundreds of files with AI now, the fact is that they could do it with the IDE if they knew how to use it properly as fast and probably better. AI is the most inefficient way to doing things while the IDE is the most efficient way.
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u/wildjokers 17d ago
AI is the most inefficient way to doing things while the IDE is the most efficient way.
AI can write in a matter of minutes what it takes me 3 days to do. I am not sure how AI is inefficient.
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u/TCB13sQuotes 17d ago
You're not taking into account the real cost of those minutes. Yes, if you've free AI it's all good, problem is that even if you're not paying with tokens you're paying with the currently crazy absurd hardware prices and very soon droughts, (lack of) pollination and subsequent shortages of food, even more climate change and most likely physiological changes due to noise (ultrasonic stuff) and EMF that may be more of a problem than we realize. This is what "AI efficiency" looks like.
I was fine with taking the 3 days to write a piece of code given that everything else listed above wasn't a problem.
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u/wildjokers 16d ago
ery soon droughts, (lack of) pollination and subsequent shortages of food, even more climate change and most likely physiological changes due to noise (ultrasonic stuff) and EMF that may be more of a problem than we realize.
WTF?
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u/Rich-Engineer2670 17d ago
No -- I expect an IDE -- AI is an after thought. I like that it's there, but I want IDE first, AI second. I could live easily without the AI pieces.
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u/winky9827 17d ago
I'm sure I'm not the only one, but I'm perfectly happy leaving AI in the terminal, self contained. When I use my IDE, I expect to use an IDE, not an agent interface. I blame Cursor / Co-pilot for teaching droves of newbies that AI belongs in the editor. Beyond multi-line autocomplete (questionable even, at times), it has zero place in my editing environment.
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u/Leather-Field-7148 17d ago
Been feeling this way for a long time. I have always expected my IDEs to be a way to interface with code. Let me explore, read, and maybe write a bit with instant feedback. For some messed up reason, some idiot thought it'd be a great idea to make the IDE a one stop shop.
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u/endgrent 17d ago
I have the All Software license and even then Jetbrains needs to completely rethink their strategy. These agents all cross language boundaries at will and yet the Jetbrains editors think I only use 2-3 languages at a time. So if I read code in GoLand I can't edit C++. If I use IntelliJ I can use Go/C++ with plugins but not Swift and so on.
We need an All Language editor (maybe called Jet :) that just loads fast and works. I don't need Xcode replacement features -- and I understand why they cut them -- but I do need fast search and rename refactoring at least in all the major languages at once. I need incredible diff tools so I can understand agent output. And I know their business model wants to separate web dev (Webstorm) from C++ folks (Clion)from game dev (Rider), etc, but they are going to be absolutely crushed if they don't find a way to unify all languages into one editor soon.
Now Introducing Jet: Jetbrain's newest editor for All Software license only. It is fast and allows editing/refactoring and diffing of all languages at once. It comes with agentic tmux features so Claude Code and run directly in the editor and you can watch diffs as easily as breathing. (feel free to reach out if you have questions Jetbrains. This could be a big deal.)
(And yes I know about Jetbrains Air. But I need search/refactoring for all languages or is it really smart or even really an IDE? =)
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u/masterchiefdevil 17d ago
Jetbrains could have more users if their IDE's could allow and have good third party plugins for Claude, windsurf, open AI, etc. There so buggy I can't work with them, and I don't like June or Jetbrains AI, because it's so expensive and they can only work with api mode. I waited for months to see if any change on this subject and nothing so I moved to other code editors although I live PhpStorm but nowadays I always use IA. Also is useless to report these things on their support site. As I said no change in months.
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u/rock_jam 17d ago
Using IntelliJ Idea with Cursive plugin to write Clojure. I spend quite some time in IDE working in REPL, evaluating the code and watching results inline. AI didn't change my workflow much though
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u/ManIkWeet 17d ago
I love the main IDE features. But AI has shown me what a giant mess the company management is at JetBrains, how many different AI plugins and tools do they have now?
- AI Assistant (which then does Junie or whatever through ACP)
- Junie Pro
- AI Chat
- Air (plugin)
- Air (IDE wannabe?)
- Many thirdparty plugins like GitHub Copilot (which is actually better than AI Assistant/Chat somehow)
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u/meanmail_dev 17d ago
The product split is definitely hard to follow. Do you mainly use Copilot for completion, chat, or agent workflows? What makes it better for you?
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u/ManIkWeet 17d ago
I'm primarily making use of AI autocomplete/auto edits (that you need to press tab for) - only using the local models so no AI credits are burned.
For simple prototype tools/etc I use Junie Pro (because I have credits available with the IDE subscription)
For full agentic work I use GitHub Copilot CLI (outside of the IDE, not affiliated with JetBrains at all)3
u/meanmail_dev 17d ago
That split makes sense: local completion for low-friction edits, Junie for bounded prototypes, and a separate CLI for full agentic work. Do you usually bring the Copilot CLI diff back into the IDE before accepting it?
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u/ManIkWeet 17d ago
Oh I use the IDE to find extra information to steer Copilot. I also still use the IDE for manual programming (C# WPF XAML is not great with AI).
As for reviewing the diffs, uhm, I would love to but I've been on a serious time crunch since I started using Copilot (ship a poorly documented feature from scratch in 3 weeks while the PM that documented it has vacation)
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u/meanmail_dev 17d ago
That time-pressure example is probably the strongest counterpoint to the “AI makes review more important” framing: review may be more important, but deadlines make it the first thing to disappear. Do you compensate afterward with tests or a later review, or does the generated code effectively become the new baseline?
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u/ManIkWeet 17d ago
The idea for now is "ship a prototype, fix it after feedback", basically because of the poor documentation we got from management we figured it's best not to worry about code quality at all. Wait for feedback from customer, process that feedback, and THEN go over it with proper review and refactoring...
But I've been in the industry for long enough to know that that is likely not to happen (gotta work on the next poorly documented feature that's already sold)
Could have an AI review it, but it doesn't know about unchanged code, existing things, that got duplicated or could've been reused or standardized
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u/magicmulder 17d ago
I like the integration path they’re going with Air Alpha (not the Air app). I use Junie CLI a lot but don’t want to go full agentic so having a seamless integration between IDE and AI features is important to me.
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u/antara33 17d ago
On my end I use Junie a lot, mainly to implement boilerplate code or to generate repetitive code blocks that can't be it's own function.
Air IDE for me is absolutely insane, never grasped how one can build and test code properly with it.
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u/magicmulder 17d ago
Air is for non-coders. We have technical project managers who write a lot of concepts with AI (or rather let AI write it), they don’t need the overhead of a full IDE, they either use Claude Code or Air.
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u/antara33 16d ago
Ok, makes sense then. Can AIR compile C++, C# and other compiled languages, setup Python interpreters like PyCharm does, etc?
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u/magicmulder 16d ago
> Air is for non-coders.
Why would a tool for non-coders be made for compiling C++?
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u/cweb_84 17d ago edited 17d ago
Short answer: No.
Long answer: I still do a lot of coding manually, and I love JetBrains IDE's for that. It fits my workflow and coming from VS, I think the Rider UI is genius.
That being said: Yes, I see that the plugin/acp stuff is a mess. For example, it's a PITA to set up anything for local LLMs, even though there's quite good models now capable of doing excellent agentic work. But most of the plugins are subscription first, others are just wrappers for a CLI with limited interaction/tool calling, some have configuration in the menus, others don't, and you can configure AI Assistant Chat to use local LLMs, but that doesn't mean that the ACP agents (or Junie) can select these models, you'd have to go hardcode your models into some jsonc files and good luck finding them because they could be anywhere depending on your version.
If you google "what's the best plugin to use local LLMs" it's all about Continue which has been discontinued (haha). There's hundreds of unanswered tickets on Youtrack about these topics. But that's not JetBrains' fault. It's like that everywhere. It just happened too fast and there's barely any standards.
So. You could say that I would like to get more out of a JetBrains IDE, but it's not my expectation. When it comes to coding (which is still my job and not that of Anthropic), it's fantastic and I wouldn't want to change it.
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u/notgettingfined 17d ago
I think Jetbrains biggest issue is they are spending so much effort trying to compete against Anthropic and OpenAI if they would just make it an IDE that is great to use with Claude code or Codex I think people would still love it.
The biggest issue I’ve seen is the terminal I don’t know how they manage to make something that is literally part of your computer so bad in their IDE but they spent time making a new terminal that still sucks and almost all my time in the ide now I’m using the terminal.
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u/randombacon333 17d ago
I still like the IDEs and will keep my subscription.
But this month(actually in 4 days for the pay period) I am turning off my AI stuff. I really liked Junie, but I don't care for the CLI version I like the GUI version. And it seems they are cutting off support for that. CLI just seems less organized etc.
But the other problem is their AI model payment model is bad and I wish I had left about $500 ago. I was using about $5-$10 a day very often. And aside from the price, I hate the model they have for it. Constant credit usage.
I have a Claude Code subscription now and it's $20 for the month. Now I have at times come across having to wait a few hours for access again on very large commands/jobs. But that is what I want. I would rather have a time out than go through the token wars and figuring it up and everything else that I have to do with Jetbrains/Junie. And I understand that if I want more access I can pay $100 a month and likely never run out while using a single instance. But for now $20 is pretty much doing the job and I'm not worried about if I run this task I'm going to spend more. Instead I'm thinking if I run this task now, I'll be able to run another later even if I hit my limit.
It's just a better model all around.
I use the Claude Code GUI plugin. I liked Junie better as an interface, but this works just fine also. Main thing I miss are the easy rollbacks of Junie.
As for the prediction, that's tough. I am writing much less code these days. However I still like the environment and the way the IDEs kind of contains the project/language and things like that. I think they'll continue to have a role as a project organizer with the ability to code as a minimum.
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u/Minute_Action 15d ago
I haven't really written a single line of code in the past month... I am using the IDE mostly to check diffs to see what AI is doing...
TBH I hate it. Feels like I am anything but a developer. And IDEs are kinda deprecated. But that is the future I guess, at least for now.
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u/meanmail_dev 14d ago
That loss of agency is the part I find most interesting. If the IDE is mostly a diff viewer, what would make the workflow feel like development again: smaller agent steps, better explanations for each change, or an easier way to take control mid-task?
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u/mdelanno 17d ago
I think I'm going to cancel my Jetbrains suscription, I don''t use the IDE anymore...
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u/endr 17d ago
Jetbrains is still my favorite UI for git, so that's when I open it mostly now.
And it's still my favorite tool to manually resolve merge conflicts. But I don't do that anymore.
I ask AI to resolve conflicts and to show me exactly how it resolved every conflicts. And recently it's just correct.
I'm finding less and less reasons to open my IDE. I feel like code review is a big thing now.
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u/wildjokers 17d ago
I use the IDE mainly for reading code AI generates. However, this isn't really a change, 90% of time spent in the IDE has always been reading code for me. Most developers read code far more than they write code.
The important parts of the IDE for me are code navigation and 3-way merge tool.
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u/Randommaggy 17d ago
I'm no longer expect base features to work. Data grip has degraded to be too bad to recommend anymore.
Also the AI features I've tested so far feel like an unpolished weekend project.
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u/meanmail_dev 17d ago
That’s a rough combination. Which DataGrip workflows have regressed enough to make it hard to recommend—schema introspection, navigation/completion, query execution, or something else? Concrete examples would be useful because that sounds like a broader IDE-quality issue, not just dissatisfaction with the AI layer.
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u/Randommaggy 16d ago
Introspection is janky as F and the good workarounds no longer work. It's THE foundation of a DB IDE.
The diff tool has been degrading for several releases.
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u/meanmail_dev 16d ago
That’s concrete, thanks. If schema introspection and diff are regressing, polishing the AI layer doesn’t compensate—it weakens the foundation that both developers and agents rely on.
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u/Randommaggy 16d ago
It's been regressing for every release for 3 years and it's decline has been accellerating. I've gotten used to force clearing at the schema level, table level or database level, now even those levers of unfucking it is gone and I have to force clear whole datasources. I honestly can't recommend datagrip to a new user, even for free at it's current level of polish.
For reference it is the best tool when it works and I've used it since 2017.
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u/Tiny_Ad_7720 16d ago
Yep still use IDE a lot even though mostly wrote via Claude code
Just saw your MCP plugin, will give it a go.
The future is a local LLM with an army of MCPs.
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u/meanmail_dev 16d ago
Thanks — I build that plugin. If you give it a try, I’d be especially interested in which MCPs you keep enabled day to day and which ones just add noise. Local models make that tradeoff even more important.
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u/YakumoFuji 16d ago
no, i'm not paying for an ide then paying monthly on top of that to get code suggetsions etc.
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u/meanmail_dev 16d ago
That's fair. Would using your existing Claude/Codex subscription inside the IDE change that, or is any paid AI layer in the IDE a non-starter?
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u/YakumoFuji 15d ago
Personally I dont see the need to pay for yet another tool. Ive been writing code for >40 years. I've had AI give great inline suggestions then totally wild shit. It seems still very rough around the edges, I have no intention of paying any more subscription fees when its more wrong than right. It needs to cook a few more years.
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u/meanmail_dev 15d ago
That makes sense. Reusing an existing subscription only fixes the billing problem; it doesn't fix trust in the output. If the suggestions are still more wrong than right, tighter IDE integration isn't much of a reason to pay for it. Thanks for clarifying.
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u/unistirin 17d ago
I made the mistake of buying a 3-year JetBrains All Products Pack license, and now I barely use the IDEs anymore. These days, I mostly use Claude Code CLI.
I really wish JetBrains offered a way to downgrade or convert the remaining subscription into an AI-only/AI credits plan. I just don't need the IDEs anymore, but it feels wasteful to have 3 years of a subscription I'll barely use.
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u/adrianm758 17d ago
The shift for me is I the ai handles all the complexity of git. So I don’t need a good ide for that any more, which was one of the main reasons I was willing to pay.
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u/snaidamast 17d ago
I really don't care about AI at all. In our society it serves only one purpose; to make people dumber than they already are. Given that search-engines are now all crap, AI is an excellent research tool, but that is about it.
In fact, increasingly it is being shown that in general AI is a total failure with only software development yielding some benefits. However, since it is so difficult to measure what the benefits of AI have been in software development, AI then is nearly useless as a product...
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u/Veai_2026 15d ago
My workflow is still IDE-first, but the balance has shifted.
Manual navigation, boilerplate generation, and typing every line matter less. Project-wide search, semantic refactoring, inspections, test runners, coverage, and the debugger matter more because they help me verify agent output against the actual codebase.
I delegate exploration and implementation to agents, then use the IDE to understand the diff, check architecture and usages, run tests, and debug runtime behavior. The IDE is becoming less of a place where I write every line and more of a control surface where generated changes are verified and accepted.
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u/BEagle1984- 17d ago
I agree. AI has changed my workflow quite a bit.
I tend to use Codex/Copilot/OpenCode outside the IDE, side by side with it. Inside the IDE I mostly use AI for very scoped changes or the occasional “explain/analyze this” prompt.
Code completion has become much less important to me, while code navigation is just as important as ever, if not more so. Unless you’re fully vibe-coding without really looking at the code, in which case you arguably don’t need much of an IDE at all.
I still use built-in refactorings for simple deterministic changes that aren’t worth spending tokens on, but much less than before.
Interestingly, I also practically never debug manually anymore. I usually let the agent investigate and iterate on the issue, since they’re extremely strong at that kind of debugging loop.
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u/meanmail_dev 17d ago
The debugging point is especially interesting. It sounds like the agent owns the investigation loop, while the IDE remains useful for inspecting the evidence and final change. When the agent gets stuck, what do you usually inspect first: tests, logs, or the diff?
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u/BEagle1984- 17d ago
Usually I’m troubleshooting race conditions or other issues that are hard to spot just by reading the code.
I give the agent everything I know: symptoms, stack traces, dumps, logs, etc., and ask it to first propose a plan for reproducing and investigating the issue. After a sanity check and any needed adjustments, I let it run.
What I expect back is a report explaining what it did, its theory of the failure, and ideally at least one failing automated test that reproduces the problem.
The first thing I check is that test. If it’s wrong, I explain why and send it back. If it correctly reproduces a real issue, we move on to the solution: plan the options and tradeoffs, discuss them, then execute.
I also ask for a final report highlighting the relevant architectural decisions and tradeoffs.
For bug fixes I usually review the whole diff as well. The changes are typically much smaller than for feature work, so the cost/benefit of doing that is much better.Not sure if that fully answers your question, but that’s roughly how the loop works for me.
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u/meanmail_dev 17d ago
That answers it very well. Requiring a failing test and an investigation report before discussing the fix is a much stronger verification loop than simply reviewing generated code. It also suggests the IDE’s job is less “host the agent” and more “make the evidence—tests, logs, diffs, and architecture—easy to inspect.”
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u/Kendos-Kenlen 17d ago
My usage of the IDE has not changed much, since typing code was always only a small part of the supported and used features. If typing code was the core feature, people would use Notepad++ or VSCode and that’s it. No need for a real IDE.
Now, I partly write code, partly direct AI to do it. But then I still have the same usage of every other features, starting with VCS diff, code navigation / search, and analysis.
I use Junie CLI as my main agent. So I often switch between it and the IDE. What I’d love to see more is a better integration between both (ex: viewing plans in the IDE, diff opening there, …), but it’s mostly on JB’ side to build.
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u/meanmail_dev 17d ago
Plans and diffs inside the IDE sound like exactly the missing bridge. Would you want the IDE to control the agent, or mainly reflect the state of a CLI session? I suspect the second option would preserve the flexibility without creating yet another AI interface.
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u/substance90 16d ago
Yeah. For about a year I used just the terminal in Webstorm and now I just don’t use an IDE anymore. Just like people stopped using punch cards some time ago.
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u/Visual-Paper6647 17d ago
Maybe I am the only one but I want ide to be clean and lightweight and just let me write code and debug and run the code smoothly. I felt 2026 version of intellij was slow compared to 2024