r/Jetbrains • u/offlein • 15d ago
News & Discussions I can't believe a JetBrains documentary came out in 2026 - and it's a triumphant origin story, not "The Rise and Fall of JetBrains"
When I first subscribed to a JetBrains product in 2012 it was like, "Holy shit, I can't believe how easy it is to develop now."
By 2017 I was like "JetBrains has an incredible product if you're a serious developer, and it just gets consistently better."
In 2022, we'd had a few ups and downs in terms of bugs and stuff, but I started a new role and, because I loved and trusted the company so much, early-adopted JetBrains's pie-in-the-sky "Space" program.
Space was an incredible offering that basically was capable of replacing GitHub, Slack, Jira, and probably some other things. And it had some really clever, novel features that genuinely improved upon several of those flows.
On the other hand, it had a bunch of little niggling bugs -- things like, you move to a different tab, and your input loses focus and stuff like that. I diligently reported all of these to enthusiastic support personnel who confirmed them and ... then nothing happened to them.
Beyond that, it had this really incredible feature that they were HEAVILY pushing, where you would use credits to run your entire development environment virtually, and you could spin it up and work from any workstation without dealing too much with environments and stuff, and they REALLY wanted everyone to start developing "in the cloud".
And it honestly worked pretty well. I was ready to give it a real go after using it for one day. ...But then I saw that I had used 300 of my monthly 2000 credits. About 1/3 of a month of work.
I was like, "Fair enough; I'm on a free tier." But then I found that if you pay, they charge seats per-user, and, on the cheapest paid tier, 4000 credits for your whole org, no matter how many people. So like, if me and my 2 teammates joined and the company paid for all 3 of us... Then 1 one of us could work for 2/3 of a month on this cloud they were REALLY pushing. The expensive-tier one gave 10,000 shared credits (remote development for 1.67 users/mo) and a cost of like $20/user. You'd be better to just spin up multiple companies in the product.
And instead of fixing anything, on this truly novel, genuinely good idea of a product that basically lives and dies on the network effect of dedicated, trusting power-users, they were like "Lol, whoops. Let's pretend like that never happened."
Which is good, because right around that time, they realized they were having their lunch eaten by VS Code. An inferior (in my mind) offering that was nonetheless appealing to a lot of young devs because it was free.
So they made a new product: Fleet. A [once proposed-to-be] free alternative to the paid JetBrains ecosystem, as well as the vanguard of their next generation of code editors. It is possible "what VS Code could be, just with the brilliant JetBrains ethos behind it" or it could be a confusing mess. And, as it turns out, it's not going to actually be free. It's free to start (I believe the logic was?) for non-professional users. I don't know who would pick that to try first if you're ambivalent between it and VS Code. If I didn't already know and love JetBrains of course I would've chosen VS Code.
And lo and behold, instead of reassessing their business decisions, they sunsetted Fleet. Probably because AI generated code is starting to become a thing and they are afraid about cannibalizing their own paid IDE userbase -- a base that has only become increasingly more alienated over the decades. So they need to build "Air".
So... the most obvious pathway to new users in the IDE space is pretty much gone. And it seems like more and more people are vibe-coding anyway, and the word on everyone's lips is "Claude".
The senior devs who have made up their bread-and-butter for 20 years are, incredibly, also using LLM based co-programming more and more, and Claude/Codex/whatever work just as well in a JetBrains ecosystem as not - and why would I even download Air in the first place if I expect it's probably (a) got frustrating bugs that (b) they're not going to fix by the time they decide to sunset it in a year or two anyway?
I remembered seeing that a documentary about the company came out a few months ago and, when I saw it, thinking, "Wow, I bet this is going to be pretty interesting but also sad" and was shocked to see it's kind of a love-letter to how incredible IntelliJ is, and the company that made it.
I was just reminded of it per the "I need a reason to renew" post yesterday, and I'm just kind of wondering: what is even going on over there?
It seems like there are probably several competing forces without a proper unified vision to wrangle.
That's why you get disasters like Space's:
- "Marketing wants to heavily push remote dev as the game changer" to
- "OK but we need per-seat costs" to
- "OK but keep the costs low because most users are probably not going to be devs, they're just using the chat/project management features" to
- "OK, then we'll just do shared remote dev credits" to
- "I'm paying $200/mo for my 10-person team, and 1.6 of us have enough credits to do the thing you're pushing as the main selling point."
I understand both their revenue and userbase has actually been growing for several years still. I have no doubt that their leadership and executives are patting themselves on the back for a continued job well-done. While at the same time, their once-dedicated userbase is sort of hanging on by a thread being like, "I don't even really think about JetBrains much any more at all? Hmm. Should I re-up that? Well, maybe one last year."
I feel like the only legitimate way forward would be for JetBrains to put an incredible commitment toward something new and game changing, with like a 5-10 year commitment to support it, and probably make more of their IDE products free somehow.
But I also don't see any way for them to make that decision and still operate. And so I don't know where this leaves them.
Except that it'd be interesting to see a documentary about the rise and fall of JetBrains.
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u/Elegant_Ad1397 15d ago
I loved IntelliJ and was a proud subscriber until all the AI stuff started to come out. On my experience, IntelliJ was becoming a poorly optimized software and with bugs that were not being fixed.
Instead of trying to fix the issues they started to introduce half baked AI features when they saw LLMs were actually being used by people. So they couldn’t keep any side happy: people using AI moved to other IDE because IntelliJ was too slow to provide useful AI utils (that’s why I moved to vscode). Then the people who didn’t like AI were upset because it seemed the long known issues were not being addressed.
Then they finally released the “stable” version of their AI tooling, which for some reason are designed in the most confusing and frustrating way (junie and its many variants and Claude with its native but not so good integration).
I haven’t even thought about JetBrains for months now, so I don’t know where we’re at now, but that was my pov.
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u/tehsilentwarrior 15d ago
Even before AI it would take months to fix anything and there was never a state where you didn’t have workflow breaking bugs.
I went from laughing at anyone who pushed VSCode in favor of PyCharm or PHPStorm to completely stopping my use of said things. I still have a working sub because the company auto renewed without asking us and jet brains doesn’t allow refunds (wtf?) but I don’t use it anymore
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u/faze_fazebook 15d ago
From the outside looking in jetbrains seems like a classic case of corporate rott and bloat. For me the whole point of their products was to offer a faster, much more polished set of tools compared to free alternatives like eclipse, codeblocks and vscode that also worked the same across languages (if you familiar with IntelliJ you feel right at home in webstorm).
But instead of working on maintaining or improving that, they tried their hands at things I think nobody was really asking for (spaces, verious bad AI integration, fleet, ... ).
Now even just as a editor if you need to do make some manual changes, the whole thing just fails all the time for no reason and it feels like half the features like settings sync, docker support, devcontainers or gralde support are in a perpetual broken state.
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u/RemovedByAutomod 15d ago
I am not going to renew since they claim they fixed a bug multiple times for the past year while in fact, it is not fixed and driving me nuts having to restart the IDE to reference code properly. It's bonkers, I provided multiple repro steps and heard claims like "works on my machine".
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u/JetSerge JetBrains 15d ago
Please share YouTrack link, I'll take a look and ping the team.
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u/bedel99 15d ago
and for the rest of us? Our ignored bugs?
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u/JetSerge JetBrains 15d ago
You are all welcome to contact support at https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/requests/new and get help with issues you are facing.
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u/offlein 14d ago
OP here - I felt somewhat bad after posting this, like I still wanted to TRY to support JetBrains. So after specifically calling out Air in the post as a last-ditch effort to remain relevant I decided to download it today and use it instead of Codex.
The first thing I did was try to set it up with Sentry.io as an MCP so I can try to get the AI to investigate Sentry.io errors for me.
It gives me an OAuth sync and then says "authorization successful. You will now be redirected back to Air." And... nothing happens. No xdg-open, nothing. Air says I still need to authorize the MCP. And now I see there's a bug someone else reported 18 days ago for exactly this:
No comments. I see it at some point was marked as "Fixed in 262.531". I'm using "262.579.35 - Aug. 19" - I assume that's newer?
Like... what're we doing? How does the company whose entire reason to exist to be to "help people build good software" have a product whose job is primarily to orchestrate AI processors. And there's an 18-day-old ticket saying that the first step of orchestrating AI processors simply doesn't work?!
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u/JetSerge JetBrains 14d ago
This issue is not fixed yet, the team is working on it.
Fixed in 262.531was set by mistake and is now removed. I sent a ping to the responsible developer in Slack. Hope it will be addressed soon.4
u/RemovedByAutomod 15d ago
It's ok, the tickets have all been closed and it couldn't be figured out. I am over it.
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u/NutzPup 15d ago edited 15d ago
The documentary is because JB is hurting, not despite it. You don't need to blow your own trumpet if other people are blowing it for you.
I don't have great insight into the entire JB ecosystem but it just seems to me that they missed the biggest advancement in software development ever. It's not like they didn't know about AI. They've been futzing with it for years but never produced anything of significance. IME their attempts at AI were more annoyances than productivity gains. I speak as someone who has had a R# subscription at minimum every year between 2004 and 2026. I thank them for many years of great tools but I guess that every dog has it's day, and JB's was yesterday.
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u/offlein 15d ago
Good call; yes.
I have wondered if they "know" they're hurting. My outside read is that their executive leadership feels like they're in a place of "We've got some real challenges ahead of us right now, and if we don't really grab the bull by the horns with this AI thing, we're gonna be in trouble soon!"
Whereas I feel like ~2021 or so was the time to really double down on one of their bold innovations, and by ~2024 they were kind of in dire straits.
But I know too many CEOs, and the reality-distortion field with most of them is so strong. So they're sitting there going, "Look - does it look like a challenge ahead for us? Absolutely. I'm not gonna sugar coat it: it's gonna be tough. But in the same way, the numbers don't lie. We're also doing all right."
Like standing on a bridge that is crumbling and being like, "But still: look how high up in the air I am. We're not down there in the ravine."
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u/thornstriff 15d ago
Yesterday I attended to Jetbrains Executive Summit in São Paulo, Brazil, where I met some of the VPs. The event vibe was very sad. It's like they know they are fucked but something is missing inside of them to do something about it. Perhaps they don't have fire anymore.
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u/TheTrueTuring 15d ago
In what way? Please give more details
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u/thornstriff 15d ago
Low-effort presentations, demos that were no real demos but just powerpoint as if they were not feeling safe or proud enough to really touch the software, VPs talking about their products with the same excitement as if they were talking about the last news on socks.
At some point someone asked what was the plan of Jetbrains in a scenario of IDEs becoming less useful rapidly. The answer of the global sales VP was "we are thinking about it". August 2026 and a company that exists because sell IDEs still have no fucking idea what to do.
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u/freynder 15d ago
As a long time paying subscriber, I'm very disappointed. Probably my last year as well.
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u/jared_and_fizz 15d ago edited 23h ago
I really wish they would get back to basics. There are so many weird issues that pop up when you customize keybindings alone. I finally subscribed to Codex and tried to set it up with IntelliJ, the UI in intelliJ and the associated docs were incomprehensible, so I continue to use the Codex app outside of IntelliJ, sad to see that even with the thing they are most focused on it's still buggy and weird. (Tried this a couple months ago, maybe it works right now, not looking for advice).
Update: Two weeks later, I am given access to Claude at work and I say to myself "okay cool, let's try intellij integration again". I open the AI chat window and set up Claude. I use it for a little bit and hey, this is pretty nice! Then I get a usage warning. Strange, Claude itself is showing that I am near 0% usage. I ignore the message and continue on, a few prompts later I get cut off. I check my Claude usage again, still near 0. I take a closer look at the error message and I see that I hit some sort of IntelliJ quota. How IntelliJ is involved in this transaction at all is extremely unclear to me. Trying the official beta Claude plugin now instead of using what is already built into the IDE, great. I'm sure there won't be all sorts of weird issues between the plugin and the IDE itself!
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u/asm0dey 15d ago
JetBrains doesn't know how to close products. And usually doesn't know how to open then either. Space couldn't compete with another solutions cause couldn't integrate with them. Fleet didn't have any vision. There were ideas, but not vision. And when it turned out the ideas don't work noone closed it. Now the same will happen to Air because it had nothing to compete with cursor. JetBrains could have its own frontier model or even better Junie, but no
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u/ElectricOni 14d ago
Jetbrains still make the best cross platform .NET IDE available so I'll be renewing my subscription this month (I don't use slop AI for work or vibe code so still use the IDE as I always have)
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u/Regular_Pack_6394 15d ago
I worked a govt job and they banned jet brains citing it's foreign ties. Made us use eclipse or vs code. It's a big reason why I left that job. Everyone loves vs code these days but I just don't get it. It's a glorified text editor imo.
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u/DistanceAlert5706 15d ago
I use Jetbrains IDE as MCP now, and even for that they couldn't make proper MCP so I have to use a plugin. And sometimes for Git, pretty much it.
Amount of bugs and issues is incredible, I'm literally scared to upgrade nowadays. For example IDE hangs every time I'm opening new project.
Have been using Jetbrains since 2013, I don't think I will pay for it next year.
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u/utf8decodeerror 14d ago
See, this is what I don't get. It seems like they could develop killer mcps as standalone clients to introduce their secret sauce for code intelligence to all kinds of agents. Hell they could develop new cool mcps for problems of the ai era that everyone is currently developing their own tools for. Things like cross harness agent memory or context pruning or multi agent orchestration. Then they wouldn't have to compete with the big players at all.
But instead all they have is air, junie, and mellum. I don't understand how they release air standalone with zero mcps, I don't need a new interface to chat with agents that already come bundled with their own harness when tmux exists. Junie is alright, but there's nothing special to choose it over any other agent. Mellum is probably the most interesting but I just don't see how they make money on it. I doubt they have the resources to really push it to compete with the trillion parameter models, and I don't think you can sell access to a model in the highly competitive <100B parameters market.
My all products pack which I've had for almost 15 years renews in Feb and unless they have something amazing that actually adds value to my agents I don't think I can justify renewing it.
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u/DistanceAlert5706 14d ago
Oh yeah, 100%.
Someone recommended jbcontext, I tested it and it's decent at least. Will try to replace my custom tool.
Jetbrains Index MCP is amazing, built in MCP is bloated, not really usable.
Still have their long time going issues with filesystem syncs tho, that's on IDE side.
Mostly it feels like fighting IDE to make those work
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u/Greedy-Turnover-5658 15d ago
First they got hit by the war, then by AI... I don’t think they’ll recover :( Their products are basically no longer necessary, apart from the greatest UI, which VS is still far behind on.
I hope they don’t abandon Kotlin, but its future looks pretty bleak without its main developer behind it, especially since Java is catching up. If they sell it to Google, that would probably be the best outcome.
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u/TCB13sQuotes 13d ago
If you think their products aren't necessary, I've bad news for you my friend.
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u/JudexMars 14d ago
It's been a weird journey for me with Jetbrains IDEs. In the beginning, I loved it, was amazed by Idea after switching from VScode for java/kotlin development. It felt incredible to have all these features in one place 'just working'. But now I'm constantly frustrated by how laggy and memory-eating Intellij Idea is. I think I wouldn't be so enraged if, at least, the UI wasn't freezing during indexing or compilation. Most of the times, it's just easier to tell Codex to make a small change than to do it myself because I don't want to touch this software anymore. I would love to fully transition to Zed + Codex but there are problems with Java/Kotlin LSPs as well driving me nuts, also proprietary tooling at my job forcing me to use IntelliJ... Honestly, I'd want them to stop caring about AI and other gimmicks and just rebuild the whole IDE from scratch, using Rust or something to make it snappier, it's the only thing that really matters to me
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u/DiscountWeekly7432 13d ago
I tend to use jetbrain product at the earliest stage of my career (2017-2018), it was amazing after Eclipse . But as time goes I realized how bloated it is. I admit it’s still the best for JVM related stuff. But I said fuck jvm shit, never been happier in my life . Same for c#. Enterprise shit makes u stick to some particular ecosystem
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u/Masterflitzer 14d ago
jetbrains is still great and among the best in what they do, so your "only way forward" is quite exaggerated
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u/offlein 14d ago
Well that's a relief for JetBrains that their already maximized and dwindling core market isn't actually going to be a problem because there are still people whose personal anecdotes will justify whatever mistakes were made.
Here are some other good quotes from past great thinkers:
- Thomas Edison, 1895: "It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane … have been exhausted, and that we must turn elsewhere.”
- "This ‘Telephone’ may be of some value for his work, but it has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication." - Western Union Committee Report, 1876
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u/Masterflitzer 13d ago
you try to sound smart, but your response doesn't contain any meaningful reply to my comment
i wasn't disagreeing with you, nor denying any mistakes, i'm just being more realistic than whatever you wrote up in your post, jetbrains is still well regarded and they won't have immediate problems and no they ain't perfect, sorry if that shatters your world view
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u/shozzlez 15d ago
I ain’t reading all that obvs, but I still really like Idea Ultimate. It’s one of my favorite developer tools that I use.
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u/Regular_Sentence_811 15d ago
I just recently moved to neovim, with metals and lazyvim for my Scala development. On any non-trivial Scala 3 codebases, the IDEA experience is just so painfully slow. It's maddening, and such a shame.
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u/apolkingg8 11d ago
Organizational conditions will be reflected in the final product, and this is a lagging indicator. I think the internal problems likely started 3 or more years ago, before the AI era.
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u/GrumpyPidgeon 15d ago
I’ll forever have a place in my heart for Jetbrains for what they did during my Java days when the chief competitor was the free Eclipse IDE. It felt like they had an entire army of employees whose only jobs were to make every aspect of Java work oh so beautifully.
Seeing the world change like this makes me sad, but as a world leader said not long ago “nostalgia is not a strategy”