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Comment by dr_faustus | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been using JetBrains IDEs for over a decade but rarely open them anymore because working on several worktrees concurrently is extremely frustrating and wasteful. Their AI strategy is all over the place and they always wanted to sell their opaque and overpriced tokens, which made no sense. I hope they get their act together.

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I canceled my subscription after like 12 years because I realized all the things that made it great aren’t really needed anymore. The “it just works” tooling, refactoring, jumping around code, etc.

Now my agents mainly write code under my direction and I review it either in the harness or on GitHub.

I hadn’t opened it in ages and when I did need an IDE something like Zed was more than sufficient.

Code review is the problem I'm currently trying to figure out for myself. I've never liked GitHub PRs but I'm not 100% sure what I want instead (which is possibly just: it feels like it should be a VS Code plugin... But maybe I don't like VS Codes interface that much either?)

IntelliJ supports pretty decent GitHub code review in the editor. It shows the modified code in the gutter and review comments.

I use it when I need to deeply understand a PR.

Trying linear those days. I love it as a ticket system. And PR just showed up... I will review in there for a while

Part of what I've loved about JetBrians tools has been the navigation and deep semantics for large code bases. Zed is pretty basic in that regard. My agents usually get what I need, but when they go off the rails, cleanup gets interesting.

But I'll admit to keep my skills from atrophying, there are some projects of mine I don't touch with AI.

Yeah, their worktree implementation was very recently hacked in, and it really doesn't work well. The IDE project list duplicate entries for every worktree, IDE project settings don't transfer across worktrees, and every time I switch to another worktree it asks me again what project I want to open, instead of just opening the same solution I have opened.

It's wild that a set of IDEs that are generally fairly good just completely fail in this basic workflow. I really wonder what went through the minds of the product owners and developers that implemented this.

I also have to work in multiple workspaces simultaneously, and it drives me up the wall every time one of my IDE windows freezes (sometimes even just from inserting a Tab), because now ALL of them are frozen.

I thought so too until I learned that there is a dedicated worktree switcher hidden away as a tab in the GitHub pain. Now I can open each worktree in a separate window as if it were its own project. Maybe that's not everyone's ideal work though, but it's exactly what I want 99% of the time.

But I don't use it for AI assistant development, it's definitely meant for humans and not AI agents.

Their AI implementations are an absolute mess.

I know because I've tried practically all of their AI product offerings and not a single one feels coherent.

Been a paid user for a very long time but now Claude Code and Codex do the job, dont need Jetbrains anymore.

I just could not understand their AI strategy.

Same. I like their products but they have a problem with feature creep and design debt, and their AI tools are extremely in your face while also being underwhelming. I don't know if I'm going to renew my subscriptions.

I disabled all the AI tools in my JetBrains IDEs. They suddenly feel so much better. Less intrusive completions, suggestions and better performance.

An IDE still has it's uses, and it's perfectly fine without AI. Agents and IDEs have never felt like something that should be combined in my opinion.

I'm inclined to agree. Jetbrains' own agent host 'Junie' was such a paim to set up and get working with other providers that I switched to Cline. I had moderately good results with using that as a coding agent, but eventually I switched to Deepseek Harness for generative tasks and am now using my IDEs more for review.

Never used their agent. They added a lot of completions and smart features into the editor. I never got along well with that. I've reverted to static completions now, like before AI. It made the editor less distracting, more performant and much more predictable to use.

If I edit code I know what I want to edit. If I want AI to do it, I prompt an agent.

Like pretty much every traditional tech company, it looks like JetBrains is looking at the AI bubble and panics. They feel like they have to do something, anything, and quickly, when, at least in my opinion, they should take it slowly, capitalize on what they do well and progressively integrate AI where it really makes sense, rather than jumping on the (already crowded) vibe coding bandwagon.

Hopefully, all these companies will go back to reason in a few years, when the bubble will burst. By bubble bursting, I don't mean that AI will disappear, but the nonsense and crazy money around it will.

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