r/Jetbrains

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.

A year ago I was all-in on Junie and bought the super AI Pack. I was living in intellij and webstorm and even bought the all products pack because it was more cost effective with my loyalty discount.

Then Claude Code came and disrupted everything. I spend my day in iterm. I will occasionally open a file in intellij, but am getting more and more disconnected. My extra jetbrains ai subscription expired last week. I hadn't used any of my quota for months. I don't even diff in a jetbrains product, just in the github web interface. I installed the claude code plugin and it just puts the intellij wrapper around the claude code terminal. Seems like a waste of memory for the most part. Is anyone else running multiple terminal agents within the jetbrains terminal, utilizing worktrees to have multiple streams going and loving it?

I have loved intellij for years, and want to continue, but I need a reason to re-up. What am I missing? Anyone have a great reason for me to leave the terminal and go back to jetbrains?

EDIT: Looks like I asked this too late. Just checked and I auto-renewed in June, so I guess we'll see if they make something that draws me in before next June!

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.

I used to use AppCode few years ago. But it was discontinued. It was easy for me to use AppCode since it was from JetBrains and I was used to using IntelliJ.

It is a pain to use XCode due to being used to JetBrains IDEs.

Does XCode have monopoly for IOS development?

I recently published Staleguard, a free plugin that brings dependency freshness checking into the editor including severity-labeled warnings for outdated versions in pom.xml, Gradle build files, and libs.versions.toml, one-click version bumps that respect Maven properties and catalog version.refs, abandonment alerts with last-release dates, and a statistics/timeline tool window.

Alt+Enter on a libs. reference in build.gradle.kts and Staleguard resolves it back to the version catalog and offers to update the shared slf4j version key, with the changelog one click away.

Links:

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/33571-staleguard

Happy to answer questions about the implementation and bug reports are gratefully taken at https://github.com/tampwell/staleguard/issues. (or comment below)

I build plugins for JetBrains IDEs, and lately I’ve been rethinking what still matters most when agents can handle a lot of code generation.

For me, the IDE is becoming less about typing code and more about understanding and verifying changes: navigation, inspections, diffs, debugging, project context, and catching subtle mistakes.

Has your workflow changed? Which IDE features have become less important, and which ones matter more now?

Do you mostly stay in the IDE, switch between it and Claude Code/Codex, or work agent-first and open the IDE only for review and debugging?

I’m especially interested in concrete workflows rather than predictions about whether AI will replace IDEs.

Turning AI Suggestions off doesn't work. It turns itself back on the next time the IDE is launched. According to JetBrains, it doesn't stop them from charging customers for a feature the customer believes is turned off. JetBrains told me, "it's a small amount". If it's a "small amount", absorb the cost until you fix the bugs. :)

Also, I encourage everyone to review their AI usage. It seems the AI Assistant sends the same prompt multiple times.

im doing school assignment with my friend in clion and i want my friend to connect to my ide on my machine and code together

i tried ssh connection on my pc but it needs my microsoft account password for the ssh, so its not secure. i tried docker aswell but no good.
i heard that code with me is shutting down so i need other ways for me to work together in the long term

Can someone explain why JetBrains is following the herd in that it appears to be stuffing AI into every IDE every way it can?

Microsoft has done this with Co-Pilot and Visual Studio, MS Office, and other tools and it is blowing up in their faces.

Does JetBrains suddenly believe that we have all become stupid so we need AI to assist us in finishing lines of code?

I would much prefer they concentrate on such IDEs as Rider whereby they can make it even more useful and easier to use for us WPF developers. But instead it is AI and game development support, but no simple WPF Control Toolbox just so we know what we have available to us in terms of the controls for any one project.

I understand that Rider has become the premier ID for game development, but it has the opportunity to take away most of the Visual Studio Community if it would rework its priorities a little.

Besides, with research offices spread all over the globe, one would think that JetBrains could walk and chew gum at the same time...

Steve Naidamast

Sr. Software Engineer

I am a full stack developer who has been using Jetbrains products (PyCharm primarily for Django) for over a decade now. With advances of agentic coding, my workflow changed dramatically and I am looking for maybe a better alternative for the parts of Jetbrains tools I use since subscription is renewing soon.

Now it mostly is developing with Claude code locally (desktop app), then opening diff viewer on PyCharm to review the diff, navigate through the code, and then provide feedback back to the agent. Then commit once ready.

Does anyone now a better diff viewer on MacOS with comfortable code navigation that's on par with what Jetbrains offers, but being a lighter option?

I tried VS code, but that's so behind in terms of UX.

AdMob in Compose Multiplatform is easy until the app needs more than a banner.

Consent, ATT, full-screen ownership, native-ad reuse and iOS test linking all cross the shared/native boundary.

I built AdMob CMP to manage that machinery:

https://github.com/Meet-Miyani/admob-compose-multiplatform

How does this even happen in a IDE? it's like Jetbrains wants me to stop using Pycharm

Does anyone have a fix for this? I do not have the gemini AI plug-in. I am using 2026.2.01

Hello everyone, I need a free .NET IDE for Linux. I'm a Unity game developer and I am also learning backend with ASP.NET and frontend using Blazor. But I can only use Jetbrains Rider for non-commercial works and need a paid license to publish commercial applications, but I can't pay that now because I don't have a source of income and also just graduated university.

Anyone know a good alternative for Linux? I found mono develop but the last update was 2020 and the repo has been archived.

Thanks in advance : )