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Comment by PippaSedai | Hacker News Reader

I feel somewhat bad for JetBrains. Their entire world was flipped upside down. My first intro to a coding harness was through their IDE. Not even a month later and I stopped using their platform altogether. After the year is up I won’t be renewing any of my company’s subscriptions.

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.

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I can't imagine JetBrains keep existing in the following years. Every programmer I talked to in the past year (myself included) said their job was mostly reviewing generated code. I can imagine why people still use IDE to review code, but I can't name a reason to use something as heavy as JetBrains products just to review things written by others, AI or not.

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.

Interesting that you say that, the VCS / diff UI of Jetbrains has always been my favourite by far of any git UI I have tried, I feel like they have an opportunity to capitalise on that a bit more.

Not if they're going to be a VSCode skin like everyone else. ThinkRail uses the VSCode editor "Monaco."

Yeah. Sometimes I have to go down to git cli, when I mess up really bad. But otherwise, nothing beats their VCS management UI, in my experience.

You always review large code diffs by comparing them side-by-side? You never need to drop into an IDE to follow the path a branch takes? How do you review large diffs without an IDE, do you remember what every function does in a million-loc codebase?

> to follow the path a branch takes

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.

For a while I agreed with you, but then I realized I want my agent to have access to the same find references, index, and rename tools, and the rest of the refactor tools that JetBrains have always provided me. And I wanted to be able to use those, even if it means I'll have to pay for Jetbrains.

Just like it was inefficient for me to manually rename variables and classes, it's token inefficient for my agent to do that.

Yeah! Refactoring, is already a solved problem, and deterministic with IDE (unless you have an untyped Python codebase), now we are reinventing the wheel, in more broken ways?

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.

yeah. I don't think current MCPs / Claude Code plugins that are available for JetBrains IDEs do that, or do they already give access to these things ? I run Claude through the IDE plugin but all I really see being used is access to current selected file / text. If it had access to refactor tools , code warnings etc, it would've been excellent

IntelliJ is excellent for doing the code review. The git and diff is top notch.

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.

You can pay a corporate that steals other's hard work without any consequences, $20/m at least. But can't pay another one that is actually putting up a respectable product for so many years, and you at least own it, even if you decided to stop paying?

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.

With all due respect, it is not the job of the customer to keep JetBrains alive for nostalgia/pity reasons.

It's not nostalgia/pity. It's something I have use for.

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.

> Obviously, they are still a corporate, but, until now they've respected me as a consumer unlike many other corporations. I value that.

I concur. Great prices, great products, great customer support.

> I feel somewhat bad for JetBrains.

I don't, since I read their privacy policy[0] before deciding to never use their software. Might I add: VSCodium[1] exists.

[0] https://www.jetbrains.com/legal/docs/privacy/privacy/

[1] https://vscodium.com/

It's quite long, what's the problematic part in your eyes?

Oh look another account created only 12 minutes old doom posting. Getting tired of the unhinged and provocative commentary written by people or bots with ulterior motives.

Lol what? I am somewhat new to the site and this is the first post that compelled me to make a comment and thus be forced to make an account.

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?

Why feel bad about it though? If they're unable to innovate and they're stuck in their old ways, and they cannot find/advertise the benefits of either paths by using their products, why would it need to still be around? Isn't this the reason capitalism exist in the first place, the good get rewarded and the bad eventually fold?

Not everyone is a supporter of capitalism unconditionally and they did great for more than two decades.

I agree with what you are saying, but I'm not sure how much of if applies to JetBrains. They were on the beneficiary side of the same system that flipped their world around for the longest time. I don't feel that bad for them.

Sure, I'd lean more anarchist than anything else on the political spectrum, what exactly am I supposed to be upset/sad about here? Yes, they did great for two decades, so what? So did Blockbuster or Radioshack, but eventually the tides turn and the world changes, this is essentially what life is and always been.

Both of these can be true.

I can feel bad about how things went for them, without thinking we are obligated to give them government bailout or something.

I feel bad for them because they seem like some of the better actors in the dev tool space. They make quality products and seem to care about users a lot.

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 feel bad for them because they seem like some of the better actors in the dev tool space. They make quality products and seem to care about users a lot.

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.

Empathy?

Yeah, nah, I'm not sunken deep enough into the jaw of capitalism to feel fucking empathy for a corporation, sorry HN.

I don't necessarily feel bad about it, but I do feel sad about it.

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.

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