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Comment by rbehrends | Hacker News Reader

As somebody who likes and uses JetBrains IDEs, I find this fragmentation of their AI strategy (if they have one) frustrating. They now have both Air and ThinkRail in a feature-incomplete state, while the existing AI Assistant – for me far more useful than either Air or ThinkRail – seems to be getting neglected. There are numerous harnesses already, with or without GUIs and editing capabilites; good integration with existing IDE functionality is where there are very limited offerings and where JetBrains could differentiate itself.

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.

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Don’t forget about Junie either! I guess they’re throwing everything at the wall and hoping some of it sticks.

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.

The other read is that the surfeit of solutions is company teams quickly vibe coding greenfield 80%-complete answers to management's "More AI" demands.

Without having to tackle those hard and time-consuming tasks of strategy, integration, etc.

> They now have both Air and ThinkRail in a feature-incomplete state, while the existing AI Assistant [...]

The have also the Junie [0] alongside their "AI Chat" within the Jebrains IDEs.

[0]: https://junie.jetbrains.com/

Junie is integrated in the AI Assistant. It's just one of several agents you can use with it (alongside Codex and various ACP plugins). One option on a dropdown menu.

I love JB, IntelliJ IDEA is just great, but I am using it less and less with agents now. I see JB Toolbox has "Junie CLI" available for me. Have you tried both that and ThinkRail or Air? Which would you recommend for someone who is currently mostly working on the Claude App (which also manages worktrees seamlessly, which looks like what ThinkRail does)?

To this day i don't understand the difference between Junie and AI chat. Anyway, I use PyCharm on a fallback license as a read-only tool nowadays, sad but true.

Junie is an agent. The AI Assistant is the UI for agents (typically in a sidebar). You can switch to other agents if you want (such as Codex or Claude Code), and there are actually a ton that you can add with just a few mouse clicks.

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.

Yes, Junie, Air all got mixed up too much, and it was a bad decision to override some important keyboard shortcuts with Air too.

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.

> But, they still have a solid IDE

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.

I still very much love DataGrip, but it's the last of their IDEs I'm using, after being a Webstorm and IntelliJ enthusiast for ten years.

Oh, I've never really tried that one. It probably goes much further than the DB integrations in Webstorm etc., right? Do you have any favorite features that could be interesting to look at?

In terms of features, they are the same.

Oh yes to that! It is also built in to IDEA, and It's just so good! I looked for other alternatives, but nothing comes close to their database tool. Works so well.

I use only one, IntelliJ IDEA, which has all integrated, except Rider I believe.

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.

Just to add another note, Initially I was a bit skeptic about their new UI. But, they have improved it a lot, and it's really good. Even though I hide most of the UI elements in favor of `double shift`

I don't mind the new look, I also enjoyed the previous UI refresh. But I don't think UI changes are a good use of JetBrain's resources while the core functionality is frequently broken.

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...

Unfortunately, This happens everywhere.

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.

Yeah, seems that way - at least the editor space has a lot more competition than GPUs, so we don't have to put up with it.

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!

> their pricing structure heavily punishes unsubscribing.

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.

Rider for UE development is still unmatched.

Their IDEs are still better than VS. I personally also wouldn't want to resort to VS Code with independent extensions.

Many companies currently struggle to come up with a lasting strategy.

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.

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