I'm super out of the loop. What is the current best way to use AI with Jetbrains IDEs (especially the AI subscription)
TLDR: Has Jetbrains AI gotten better? I mostly gave up on Jetbrains AI about a year ago but I basically want to see if things have gotten better. How can I best use my AI subscription from within a Jetbrains IDE to get all of the modern goodness of say, adversarial sub-agents or planning or skills, etc?
I'm a tradcoder who still enjoys coding by hand from time to time, so I love working in Rider.
Early on, I used the 'AI Assistant' and I used sweep.dev for a little while, especially as 'glorified tab completion'. Then there was a lot of confusion around AI Assistant vs Junie and I eventually started doing all of my development with a number of different platforms. To keep up with the times, I've chosen a few projects to explore some of these agent flows so I can be a more well rounded developer, even if I do like coding by hand.
Here's the problem. I've been using Claude Code for the past few months pretty exclusively, and basically only use my Jetbrains AI subscription for the 'tick a few items and have it generate the commit message' for me. I almost never use the AI assistant or Junie or whatever in the IDE because I found it not performing much better than Claude directly.
Also, maybe things have changed, but when I'd tell it look at a file, I found Junie just doing a bunch of tool calls (grep or Select-String) to find files rather than just relying on the IDEs knowledge of my project, which I figured would be THE reason I'd use a Jetbrains IDE.
Anyway; I paid for the AI subscription for Jetbrains but really am almost never getting my value out of it because I've been using Claude Code more, but I was curious what the current best practices are from WITHIN Rider or whatever Jetbrains IDE. I wish I had something that didn't have to rely on random bash commands to explore my project but could have a solid understanding of things. Are there any tools these days or resources or videos of somebody that actively promotes the Jetbrains AI? Should I look into Jetbrains Air?
I mostly gave up on Jetbrains AI about a year ago but I basically want to see if things have gotten better, because at the end of the day I'm still a big fan of their products (in general) and I want them to do well. I know a lot of people in this subreddit tend to have a pretty sour or negative opinion on Jetbrains, but I basically want to give them the benefit of the doubt and don't know where to look these days.