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Comment by killerstorm | Hacker News Reader

I've been using IntelliJ IDEA and similar products for almost 10 years, and I'm not impressed.

Java/Kotlin is their main thing, and yet neither Maven nor Gradle builds are stable. If your build fails or there are some unresolved dependencies, you restart IDE in hope it works...

AI coding tool trial failed for me -- IDE told me it's not activated even after I activated it on billing portal. And doc implied it might take some time. WTF. Does it take some batch processing?..

People who were able to get AI coding tools working said it's way behind Cursor (although improving, apparently).

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Counterpoint from me: I've been using Jetbrains tools for over 10 years as well. Mostly Webstorm and Rider and it's all working well. Sometimes there are bugs, yes, but I had plenty those in VSCode and Visual Studio as well.

Aside from their initial AI plugin rollout fiasco it has been smooth sailing for me.

There's something severely wrong with your setup if you can't get stable maven or gradle builds, and your AI problem... maybe it was really early right after release? Either way, contact their support.

And if "If your build fails or there are some unresolved dependencies" you check your dependencies and config.

I'm tired of people complaining and not trying to understand how their systems (or an IDE for that matter) work.

Because JetBrains products DO have issues, but rest assured, the things you are complaining about are on the main path of basic features they take care of the most.

Source: at first reluctant but now happy IntelliJ user, after thinking for a long time that Eclipse/Netbeans would be better. I was wrong.

> There's something severely wrong with your setup if you can't get stable maven or gradle builds

To be fair with OP, I had a similar experience in the previous company. Sometimes after bumping a dependency or something, even if you asked IntelliJ to "Reload All Gradle Projects" something wouldn't work and I needed to restart the IDE. Not saying it was common, but it did happen. This was a Kotlin codebase.

Now working in a company using Scala, I had a few cases where IntelliJ failed to resolve a dependency correctly so it was saying that the class I just created didn't exist (this was in shared library and two different dependencies pulled it, but we did pin the dependency directly and sbt was building it correctly, it was only IntelliJ that was becoming confused). Cleaning up the build sometimes worked, sometimes didn't, but even when it worked it would go back after a while. Eventually we updated all dependencies in all projects and it now always works, but it was painful for a while.

Look, I understand that IntelliJ is better than Eclipse. Eclipse is just bad. (E.g. if you open existing workspace with a newer version of Eclipse it crashes - a problem they haven't fixed for 20 years!!!)

But I can tell you IntelliJ has way more issues than e.g. Visual Studio I used 20+ years ago.

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