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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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

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.

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