u/offlein

When I first subscribed to a JetBrains product in 2012 it was like, "Holy shit, I can't believe how easy it is to develop now."

By 2017 I was like "JetBrains has an incredible product if you're a serious developer, and it just gets consistently better."

In 2022, we'd had a few ups and downs in terms of bugs and stuff, but I started a new role and, because I loved and trusted the company so much, early-adopted JetBrains's pie-in-the-sky "Space" program.

Space was an incredible offering that basically was capable of replacing GitHub, Slack, Jira, and probably some other things. And it had some really clever, novel features that genuinely improved upon several of those flows.

On the other hand, it had a bunch of little niggling bugs -- things like, you move to a different tab, and your input loses focus and stuff like that. I diligently reported all of these to enthusiastic support personnel who confirmed them and ... then nothing happened to them.

Beyond that, it had this really incredible feature that they were HEAVILY pushing, where you would use credits to run your entire development environment virtually, and you could spin it up and work from any workstation without dealing too much with environments and stuff, and they REALLY wanted everyone to start developing "in the cloud".

And it honestly worked pretty well. I was ready to give it a real go after using it for one day. ...But then I saw that I had used 300 of my monthly 2000 credits. About 1/3 of a month of work.

I was like, "Fair enough; I'm on a free tier." But then I found that if you pay, they charge seats per-user, and, on the cheapest paid tier, 4000 credits for your whole org, no matter how many people. So like, if me and my 2 teammates joined and the company paid for all 3 of us... Then 1 one of us could work for 2/3 of a month on this cloud they were REALLY pushing. The expensive-tier one gave 10,000 shared credits (remote development for 1.67 users/mo) and a cost of like $20/user. You'd be better to just spin up multiple companies in the product.

And instead of fixing anything, on this truly novel, genuinely good idea of a product that basically lives and dies on the network effect of dedicated, trusting power-users, they were like "Lol, whoops. Let's pretend like that never happened."

Which is good, because right around that time, they realized they were having their lunch eaten by VS Code. An inferior (in my mind) offering that was nonetheless appealing to a lot of young devs because it was free.

So they made a new product: Fleet. A [once proposed-to-be] free alternative to the paid JetBrains ecosystem, as well as the vanguard of their next generation of code editors. It is possible "what VS Code could be, just with the brilliant JetBrains ethos behind it" or it could be a confusing mess. And, as it turns out, it's not going to actually be free. It's free to start (I believe the logic was?) for non-professional users. I don't know who would pick that to try first if you're ambivalent between it and VS Code. If I didn't already know and love JetBrains of course I would've chosen VS Code.

And lo and behold, instead of reassessing their business decisions, they sunsetted Fleet. Probably because AI generated code is starting to become a thing and they are afraid about cannibalizing their own paid IDE userbase -- a base that has only become increasingly more alienated over the decades. So they need to build "Air".

So... the most obvious pathway to new users in the IDE space is pretty much gone. And it seems like more and more people are vibe-coding anyway, and the word on everyone's lips is "Claude".

The senior devs who have made up their bread-and-butter for 20 years are, incredibly, also using LLM based co-programming more and more, and Claude/Codex/whatever work just as well in a JetBrains ecosystem as not - and why would I even download Air in the first place if I expect it's probably (a) got frustrating bugs that (b) they're not going to fix by the time they decide to sunset it in a year or two anyway?

I remembered seeing that a documentary about the company came out a few months ago and, when I saw it, thinking, "Wow, I bet this is going to be pretty interesting but also sad" and was shocked to see it's kind of a love-letter to how incredible IntelliJ is, and the company that made it.

I was just reminded of it per the "I need a reason to renew" post yesterday, and I'm just kind of wondering: what is even going on over there?

It seems like there are probably several competing forces without a proper unified vision to wrangle.

That's why you get disasters like Space's:

• "Marketing wants to heavily push remote dev as the game changer" to
• "OK but we need per-seat costs" to
• "OK but keep the costs low because most users are probably not going to be devs, they're just using the chat/project management features" to
• "OK, then we'll just do shared remote dev credits" to
• "I'm paying $200/mo for my 10-person team, and 1.6 of us have enough credits to do the thing you're pushing as the main selling point."

I understand both their revenue and userbase has actually been growing for several years still. I have no doubt that their leadership and executives are patting themselves on the back for a continued job well-done. While at the same time, their once-dedicated userbase is sort of hanging on by a thread being like, "I don't even really think about JetBrains much any more at all? Hmm. Should I re-up that? Well, maybe one last year."

I feel like the only legitimate way forward would be for JetBrains to put an incredible commitment toward something new and game changing, with like a 5-10 year commitment to support it, and probably make more of their IDE products free somehow.

But I also don't see any way for them to make that decision and still operate. And so I don't know where this leaves them.

Except that it'd be interesting to see a documentary about the rise and fall of JetBrains.