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wccrawford

I actually just decided to cancel my Jetbrains account, and your comment made me think about trying Air before I go.

I went to my Jetbrains Toolbox, and it's not there.

I went to the site, and there are 3 options:

Install it as a plugin to one of their other IDEs. This feels really stupid to me.

Air Teams. This isn't widely available yet, and you have to ask nicely and be put on a list. No go.

Air CLI. I honestly don't know WTF this is doing that I couldn't just do from the CLI with my existing agents. I already have Antigravity (for planning) using Claude for implementation and all I had to do was ask Antigravity to set it up.

They really need to get their stuff together over there at Jetbrains.

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Air was a standalone app, but it wasn't clear why and they got feedback that this wasn't wanted. You can have the exact same GUIs and functionality integrated into the IDE and it's a pure functionality upgrade. For example, Air in IntelliJ/their other IDEs lets you do things like execute SQL queries on connected databases from the chat box and have the results be sent straight to the model.

There's a school of thought that says IDEs are history, their functionality is now worthless etc. But apparently lots of people don't think that.

I guess I'm one of those people too, because I tried the Air standalone app but it didn't gel for me for some reason. But I tried Air in IntelliJ and it immediately clicked. If models were always perfect and their work never benefited from reviews or changes, fine, you could argue the IDE is pointless. But it's been years and I've not yet found a model where that's true. You can slop for a while if the project isn't that important but for the stuff that matters, human intervention still changes the quality slope quite a lot.

Don't forget about their AI Assistant (agentic but mostly chat focused plugin) and Junie (a harness, that you can apparently use through Air too), people have critiqued them about it being messy, but tbh OpenCode for example has TUI, web and desktop versions heh.

Oh to make things more interesting, Air also has a mobile option too, adding to the list. Odd to couple it with an IDE though since you have various IDEs for various stacks (e.g. IntelliJ IDEA vs WebStorm vs GoLand, unless you just shove a crapload of plugins into IDEA) and agentic tools don't always need all of that.

To be fair though, they're probably scrambling to keep up with the AI craze because it cuts into their margins A LOT and throwing everything they can at the wall. Shame they killed Fleet, could have been a cool basis to compete with Zed (or VS Code, more directly) and integrate Air there or something.

>Shame they killed Fleet, could have been a cool basis to compete with Zed (or VS Code, more directly) and integrate Air there or something.

JB’s wheelhouse is human-oriented code authoring, they own it. That realization is the fundamental reason they abandoned Fleet: as with VS Code and others, Fleet was draining their talent and would have resulted in a tool that wasn’t best-of-breed in any one category.

This situation reminds me of the beginning of the end of Borland’s demise: they spent nearly two years writing OS/2 versions of all their language products, suspending innovation and progress across the board, and allowing the competition (Microsoft) to catch up and begin to hire away their talent.

This story doesn’t perfectly align with JB, but it definitely rhymes. I hope they switched gears soon enough.

> Fleet was draining their talent and would have resulted in a tool that wasn’t best-of-breed in any one category.

Visual Studio Code, but JetBrains would have been pretty cool, especially when you want something that supports other modes of work (e.g. ADE). Now VSC/Zed fills that role and JetBrains don’t compete with them, now even to upsell to their full IDE for more deep work.

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