You know what, considering there was a recent "small" open weights LLM released recently that meets 90% of my coding needs I'm inclined to agree.

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next - relatively small, it runs on 6 6 year old GPUs on my home PC happily running 5 simultaneous 262k sessions with additional 10 cached in RAM (bought back when you didn't have to remortgage your house for Ram) and it has been the first local model that is not a toy.

But there is a class of problems where I still reach for Anthropic's fable...

However, I have a hunch bordering with certainty Anthropic is achieving such great results by doing a lot of harness tricks.

For example opus 4.8, is not much better on coding than before mentioned Qwen model, but gets amazing results on factual knowledge stuff (the knowing all works of Shakespeare thing). How hard would it be to add a general knowledge RAG to requests that contain relevant questions and beat all benchmarks like that? Not very hard.

So I think there is big innovation to be had in harnesses, routers, inference and so on.

As to money spent on AI per developer my current client (a fortune 200 software company) spends $500 per month. That is $6k a year. A lot more than your examples. And many people run out of their quota pretty quickly.

Forgive my naive understanding of LLMs - but how do you get semantic understanding of a codebase, such that it knows what changes to make/why/where, without a wider understanding of language more broadly?

I'm using the word understanding loosely there, but I couldn't think of another word.

I think this already happens through Mixture of Experts which is now build in to ost models.

But finding out what an LLM needs to understand from a business side to write your code good, is an otpimzation which no one cares currently.

I'm pretty sure we either stay on big full frontier models for a long time, just use them for everything or we will start to see more and more people doing finetuning/project specific training like java + german + english + business contxt xy;

It will be an indicator for the whole industry.

I think the amount of knowledge to correctly work on code is more than you'd think, because at the end of the day writing code without an understanding of the environment it exists in/for is likely to not fit the problem correctly. Maybe it doesn't need knowledge of _Shakespeare_ per se, but if you were working on a virtual tabletop having knowledge of tabletop games can help with identifying the right implementation to use, knowing what kind of constraints to consider, etc.

I have hope we will get there eventually, once all the hype/wealth extraction/boys club giving all their buddies money cycles end, and the specialized tools with real value start to emerge.

I think they are trying new things even with "nobody writes code anymore" in mind. Their IDEs are now MCP servers for agents to reason about the code. Imagine your agent will stop wasting tokens using grep to find symbol usages if he can just ask IDE where it is used. They are not the best option for vibecoders right now but who knows what will happen in 1 year.

Integration with other developer tools, code reviews etc. are better than ever. Ideavim is probably the best vim plugin and it gets new features every month. They are also investing a lot in the AI.

I would bet they will survive just fine unless we would write software in slack only using emoji :-)

> They either find some niche within the existing product

They should stay in where they started, dev experience and IDEs custom for each language. Entering the AI coding was a mistake in my opinion, I’m sure one can argue that AI coding would have better tooling without their IDEs, but AI coders (Cc and codex) don’t use IDEs anymore so it’s a lost battle before the start

I have been Jetbrains subscriber for over a decade and stopped using them last year. Visual Studio Code did LLM integration better. And now I am using VS Code less and less with AI-native control plane like Paseo. I can literally develop on my mobile phone.

I disagree on to do nothing is also to die, I'd love to continue paying if they prioritized bugfixing, speed, remote/container editing and having an open AI ecosystem, as well as supporting any new language features without degenerating into an "always online" editor like vs.code.

I could not care less about "new paradigm" editors, UI reworks and AI lock-in offerings, the only AI I want is let me bring my own local model, or interface with claude / codex / ...

I love their tools and am keeping my subscription for now, but would have to agree.

VSCode has been eating at their users for years now. Jetbrains tools still were much better in my opinion but they are competing with “free” and “good enough”. With AI getting better, the main advantages of Jetbrains are gone.

I don’t need a massive IDE anymore. I still need an editor, but there’s hundreds of better tools for quick edits than a massive IDE.

It’s a company at the end of the day, but I hope they find a niche or pull a Garmin play like you said, otherwise I don’t see them being relevant.

> Just like half the people expecting to still be writing code by hand.

I know this is not your main point, but common.

If this is true, AI would be the first tech impossible to learn 5 years after it appeared.

> I certainly don't need my subscription anymore

Sure. I still use mine though; privately and at work.

> Nobody is going to use their tools in five years.

> they're dead. Just like half the people expecting to still be writing code by hand.

Hyperbole much. Leave it on LinkedIn man.

Who knows?

5 years is a long time.

They're trying to navigate the AI era just like everyone else.

You know what we got told at work? “Scrappy AI startups are snapping at our heels, we need to move fast so the competition doesn't over take us”

…but if you ask: what startups? Silence. If you ask, why are we scared of some teenager vibe coding a platform and stealing our customers? Silence.

Dont question the narrative.

Of course AI is an existential threat. Of course there are vibed startups trying to eat our market.

Have you not seen our share price?

Such hyperbolic BS. Ffs. Calm down.

> Nobody is going to use their tools in five years.

What will replace it? The dumpster fire called Eclipse, certainly not. The even larger dumpster fire that is Electron based VS Code, also not. And "vibe coding", "agentic AI" etc. will also be a thing of the past once the VC money spigot selling tokens for far below actual cost dries up.

The JetBrains portfolio is here to stay.

(One might even see a total ban for American products in the EU or a significant push in sovereign technology on the horizon, and JB stands to profit from both options!)