ThinkRail from JetBrains
thinkrail.ai
thinkrail.ai
As a point of comparison, Zed does the agentic side panel overall better (though still not perfectly), but Zed is still by its nature more limited than e.g. PyCharm or CLion or RustRover or Rider.
That said, I bet that’s how eventually we’ll end up with actually good ADEs (and a bunch of dead projects), by taking what works and changing or discarding what doesn’t - for example GitKraken Kepler has a really nice ticketing system integration but also the older versions I’ve tried had vibe slopped UI.
If nothing else, competition should push everyone who is capable to keep up to do better. It is kind of a bummer sometimes, though - I also wanted their Fleet to succeed, but that was before Zed became really good.
Without having to tackle those hard and time-consuming tasks of strategy, integration, etc.
The have also the Junie [0] alongside their "AI Chat" within the Jebrains IDEs.
Example: https://gist.github.com/rbehrends/4d9febe5c5c008961b309dd4a6...
The "Install From ACP Registry ..." allow you to use pi, OpenCode, Kilo Code, Cline, Cursor, Copilot (and a ton of other agents that I've never heard of) if you want.
But, they still have a solid IDE, they just need to figure out what they can do without losing that edge.
I am all for experiments, that's where all the innovations comes from. But don't push VSCode bullshit on me. If I wanted to use that shit, I would use NVIM/Vim. But not VSCode.
Which one exactly? I used to love Webstorm and Rider, but there were so many workflow-breaking bugs in each new release of Webstorm that I switched to VS Code. I still use Rider, but I've stopped my All Products subscription, because new releases usually decreased the amount of well-working features (and new features often didn't work at all).
Around 2022 I'd have agreed 100%, but these days not so much.
It has full Rust, Java, Python, Web stack, things that I work with.
There were few issues here and there occasionally, but last few months I have not faced any issues, and it's been really robust. It gets slow with LLM providers running in the background on my 7 year old laptop though. But on desktop it flies.
One example: In August 2024, new Vue projects stopped working correctly with Webstorm - not terrible on it's own, stuff can happen. The issue was reported on August 19th[0]. Someone posted a workaround, and on August 29th, they announced that a future version will fix the issue.
That future version was released on October 23rd[1]. In the intervening two months there was no indication in Webstorm that the LSP crashing was a known issue with a workaround. Users just had to search for the issue, stumble upon the thread, and manually update the component. They couldn't release this tiny version bump for two months, or at least add a link to the issue thread.
This would be fine if Webstorm were free, but it's pretty freaking expensive, and I didn't get any money back for the product being defective for 1/6th of the year.
[0]: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WEB-68756/Vue-LS-2.x-Co...
[1]: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/articles/WEB-A-233538543/WebS...
So many years I couldn't use Gnome properly because of an NVIDIA bug. We paid handsomely for our GPU, and they give a shit about us.
In the end, I'd love to see Jetbrains pull themselves together and return to their former glory. But I don't know if I'll ever give them another chance since their pricing structure heavily punishes unsubscribing. Since the bugs pushed me over that ledge, it'd seem that they should offer lower prices, not higher ones!
Sad to see that perspective. Many companies (at least in Germany) punish you for sticking with them.
Jetbrains is that rare company, where the important long term customers are rewarding by giving them a discount.
Their IDEs are still better than VS. I personally also wouldn't want to resort to VS Code with independent extensions.
They need to figure out what make sense here in terms of a product. I rather have a somewhat fragmented ecosystem right now than no relevant product from JetBrains whatsoever.
They have to try to push this stuff out to survive but none of it is innovative. Not sure why anyone would pay for this when it can be one-shot with a single good prompt. Sure, it looks fancy but I never cared about that.
I have been a paying user for about a decade. Ironically, when I recommended their products to vim/emacs users, they usually were like "thanks, but I know vim/emacs will always exist", and now I realize they really had a point.
Then there is the DataGrip stuff, I use it all the time.
And the HTTP client (.http files!) is also good. It has built in scripting.
Notice here that none of these activities is writing code.
This enhances the understanding of what I am building with the agents. I’m sure the lazy dev will just skip this and will never see any of this, just let Claude completely take over.
But vscode and vim do this just as well (in my experience). JetBrains products' advantages over the most lightweight solutions for me are:
- Faster intellisense at least for C# and Java
- Faster syntax errors and other linting-warnings
- Refactor tools
- Debugger and stack state viewer
I still use Rider, but I just don't think faster intellisense/linting matters to me nowadays. Refactor tools feel like something that should come with harnesses. The debugger still helps, but to be honest LLMs are better at debugging than me if you let them dump whatever information they need.
Plus, even with LLMs' help, making and managing a plugin for Rider is a much heavier process than the counterparts for vim/vscode.
Just like it was inefficient for me to manually rename variables and classes, it's token inefficient for my agent to do that.
Want to add an additional parameter without creating a thousands of error? Change signature, Extract a part of code to another function? Extract Method.
People are taking these small, but extremely useful conveniences, without waiting, without paying for tokens, for granted.
I have been a paid user for 12+ years. Things got difficult more me this year, but I still renewed, because it's that important a tool for me. And, probably, this is just the hill I die on, owning something, that can't be whisked away at someone else's whim.
Obviously, they are still a corporate, but, until now they've respected me as a consumer unlike many other corporations. I value that.
They have their issues. But, which application does not?!
Their Git merge UI, is just top-notch. And keeps on improving I might use another coding agent, once JetBrain's credit runs out, but I review, and make all minor changes through the IDE
Project management is just a bliss.
Working with multi-language project? No IDE can manage this how good JetBrains does.
VIM binding is just so good, I don't miss VIM editor.
And the most important point is, they do not push something I do not want continuously. Don't want AI, turn it off, and it's not even there. My data is not being used to train some big LLM, or I am not counted as a product, is really important too.
Yeah, I hope they survive this messy shit, with the core that I have respect for. I hope they don't ruin that.
I concur. Great prices, great products, great customer support.
And, also, it's kind of having a principle, my own. I have issues with corruption manifested by all of these AI corporations. It's an itch that I can't scratch, so I am trying my best to stay away from them.
It's not JetBrains is good and all. But, they're not worse, yet.
I don't, since I read their privacy policy[0] before deciding to never use their software. Might I add: VSCodium[1] exists.
I’ve used JetBrains products for at least 15 years and this is my genuine opinion. At least what I commented actually contributed to the topic?
I can feel bad about how things went for them, without thinking we are obligated to give them government bailout or something.
I would not want all my bread to have come from wheat being milled on an old watermill, but I love visiting those as museums, and I think it would be bad if they were torn down.
I probably feel about the same for JetBrains. Plus, I have fond memories of using them.
I don’t know why I should feel less empathy for them “because capitalism.” Capitalism has a lot of innocent victims, and in the AI era, there’s no longer something new to move on to.
I dunno, they always seemed like rent-seekers to me, given they have subscriptions to use their tooling, instead of "Here, buy my tool and use it", that seems user-hostile to me if anything.
> Capitalism has a lot of innocent victims
Huh? Maybe I'm too "capitalism-averse" as I never really liked it, but "victims"? The system is setup so companies that earn more money "conquer" and take over the market and everyone else falls behind them and many companies fold because of this effect. But they're more like "losers" than "victims" as everyone is willingly participating in this system, they're not exactly innocent bystanders who were unrelated.
Build a polyglot IDE that blends the agentic workflow (terminal chat sessions) with the power of an IDE. Index specs and code so that I can jump from specs to implementation and vice versa. Keep indexing all problems found in the project, with a simple "Ask agent to fix" dialog. Expose debuggers with Markdown output to agents via skills so that they stop trying to debug via logging. Keep the nice UI for build/debug/run configurations, which are still hugely important for reviewing PRs and acceptance testing what the agents are giving you. Upsell by charging to host JetBrains-cloud-isolated-agent-workspaces, like what it looks like Herdr is going to do, so that you're not limited by what you can develop solely on your machine, and development continues after you close the lid, and you can review the output with your teammates in multiplayer, like where Zed is going.
Is it really that hard?? It seems so obvious to me.
I was aiming for VS Code but since I have used Intellij and android studio a lot maybe I'll give it a try.
I would urge JetBrains to put all their LLM power and human brains at work to slash their IDEs backlog and deliver the GOAT of all IDEs. Building IDEs is their strength and there will always be a market for that category.
In a few years we won't even be reviewing code. We will have abstracted code into building blocks and review those abstractions only.
> Only 5% of code will ever need to be hand typed if that.
> Pretty sure following this advice would kill them really fast.
I also know you are not really right because I was basically known as the pycharm guy in our office and cc basically immediately killed my usage and its safe to say early adopters of something like pycharm whose selling point is the easy integration will leave for agentic practices
I love their products. But it's clear now that programming is now spec management and how do we control agents. I don't need JetBrains for that.
And spec management will become less technical as models get better. What does JetBrains think is the long term goal for this product? I don't think it'll make any sense in a few months.
Oh, I would like to disagree. Specs are transitional and have low value in the long term. The project/product documentation which one should make based on the specs and the actual implementation and found gotcha's - are the truth.
Space shuttle code might be the one exception.
I'd be interested to hear whether the 'spec' stuff works or not. I've been pondering adding a plugin for juggler based on the fact that we're rubbish at writing specs: so instead, when you prompt it, it'd get the model to list the assumptions that it's making about the task. Then the user can spot and correct any incorrect assumptions, rather than expecting the user to provide correct specs. (Haven't actually tried this yet, just speculating)
Nope. The agent doesn't actually read, and never will. That is, it may pull it into context randomly, and then purge it from context randomly. But any tool/harness/wrapper that claims that agents actually do something is selling you a bridge.
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Also, the entire page somehow manages present a condensed example of the worst marketing + the worst LLM-adjacent speech in a few short paragraphs.
Claude is still using sed and grep.
Why haven't JetBrains turned their amazing tools into amazing tools for AI harnesses to leverage? I no longer right-mouse-click on method names to rename them or to go to the definition, but my AI still needs to be able to do that, constantly.
I want to renew, but I can't see any reason why I would. Complete failure of leadership.
P.s. Worktrees? This product announcement is about supporting worktrees? They do realize just telling Claude to "blah blah in a worktree" already works, right?
Their plan is so misguided. First they wanted to pay us for separate tool and THEIR AI, which is worse than what people already pay for, few months back they finally figured out nobody wants that and just integrated it into mainline editor and now this
I am a paying user of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, but lately I've been using mostly Claude Code Desktop App.
This is a cool product. Clearly, they made the agent chat pane the primary feature, while things like the Project Files and the editor itself is secondary (you are not even allowed to change files manually!).
The chat is very well done (I think it's just Pi?). People are saying how they use the IDE mostly for reviewing code, and ThinkRail makes that a primary feature as well: every change the agent makes gives you a "Review Turn" button that lets you look at exactly what was done. And the diff viewer is very good (not the same as IntelliJ, seems more like the VS Code viewer?).
It stores everything the agent does as a "Turn" so you can review every change at any time, like a git history. It also has the git log similar to IntelliJ, so you can still click on each commit in the history as well. In fact, the two things seem very similar, since each "Turn" normally results on a commit as well. It's stil unclear to me how "Turn"s are useful beyond the commit history.
It also has a fully functional terminal so you can try out things easily without leaving the tool.
JetBrains seems to have figured out how people are using their tools nowadays, and decided to go all in with this "Innovation Lab" tool.
I would still expect to be allowed to edit code/text myself in it, and maybe navigate around like in IntelliJ, but I guess I'm in the minority :P and most people just need something like this?! It's definitely much lighter than IntelliJ (it shows way down in my process list by memory, with around 140MB after quite a bit of usage, and it's highly responsive), so perhaps that's the main advantage, and bringing code navigation/editing/highlighting for all languages (it highlights the most common ones, but not LISP for example) would just result in a heavy tool again.
Its way of working with git worktrees exclusively is something I was already doing in the Claude Code App, so I think they got this right. However, CC App can also use a SSH remote connection (like TRAMP in emacs) to a devcontainer, and I've been using that a lot, so would be nice to have that option as well.
In conclusion: I like it and I think they may be going the right way with how things are going: the "IDE" becomes primarily a means to interact with agents. But at least for me, it's a bit too early to leave the full IDE completely, and I guess they could've made this just a "mode" inside IntelliJ without losing anything except for being very lightweight, and perhaps that's what they're going to do eventually?
An AI slop webpage trying to sell me VS Code bullshit. Really?