As somebody who likes and uses JetBrains IDEs, I find this fragmentation of their AI strategy (if they have one) frustrating. They now have both Air and ThinkRail in a feature-incomplete state, while the existing AI Assistant – for me far more useful than either Air or ThinkRail – seems to be getting neglected. There are numerous harnesses already, with or without GUIs and editing capabilites; good integration with existing IDE functionality is where there are very limited offerings and where JetBrains could differentiate itself.

As a point of comparison, Zed does the agentic side panel overall better (though still not perfectly), but Zed is still by its nature more limited than e.g. PyCharm or CLion or RustRover or Rider.

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KronisLV 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Don’t forget about Junie either! I guess they’re throwing everything at the wall and hoping some of it sticks.

That said, I bet that’s how eventually we’ll end up with actually good ADEs (and a bunch of dead projects), by taking what works and changing or discarding what doesn’t - for example GitKraken Kepler has a really nice ticketing system integration but also the older versions I’ve tried had vibe slopped UI.

If nothing else, competition should push everyone who is capable to keep up to do better. It is kind of a bummer sometimes, though - I also wanted their Fleet to succeed, but that was before Zed became really good.

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t_mahmood an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, Junie, Air all got mixed up too much, and it was a bad decision to override some important keyboard shortcuts with Air too.

But, they still have a solid IDE, they just need to figure out what they can do without losing that edge.

I am all for experiments, that's where all the innovations comes from. But don't push VSCode bullshit on me. If I wanted to use that shit, I would use NVIM/Vim. But not VSCode.

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Timon3 29 minutes ago | parent [-]

> But, they still have a solid IDE

Which one exactly? I used to love Webstorm and Rider, but there were so many workflow-breaking bugs in each new release of Webstorm that I switched to VS Code. I still use Rider, but I've stopped my All Products subscription, because new releases usually decreased the amount of well-working features (and new features often didn't work at all).

Around 2022 I'd have agreed 100%, but these days not so much.

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t_mahmood a minute ago | parent | next [-]

Just to add another note, Initially I was a bit skeptic about their new UI. But, they have improved it a lot, and it's really good. Even though I hide most of the UI elements in favor of `double shift`

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t_mahmood 6 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I use only one, IntelliJ IDEA, which has all integrated, except Rider I believe.

It has full Rust, Java, Python, Web stack, things that I work with.

There were few issues here and there occasionally, but last few months I have not faced any issues, and it's been really robust. It gets slow with LLM providers running in the background on my 7 year old laptop though. But on desktop it flies.

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lbreakjai 11 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I still very much love DataGrip, but it's the last of their IDEs I'm using, after being a Webstorm and IntelliJ enthusiast for ten years.

	▲	Timon3 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Oh, I've never really tried that one. It probably goes much further than the DB integrations in Webstorm etc., right? Do you have any favorite features that could be interesting to look at?

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pqb 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> They now have both Air and ThinkRail in a feature-incomplete state, while the existing AI Assistant [...]

The have also the Junie [0] alongside their "AI Chat" within the Jebrains IDEs.

[0]: https://junie.jetbrains.com/

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brabel an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I love JB, IntelliJ IDEA is just great, but I am using it less and less with agents now. I see JB Toolbox has "Junie CLI" available for me. Have you tried both that and ThinkRail or Air? Which would you recommend for someone who is currently mostly working on the Claude App (which also manages worktrees seamlessly, which looks like what ThinkRail does)?

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rbehrends an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Junie is integrated in the AI Assistant. It's just one of several agents you can use with it (alongside Codex and various ACP plugins). One option on a dropdown menu.

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sparkling an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

To this day i don't understand the difference between Junie and AI chat. Anyway, I use PyCharm on a fallback license as a read-only tool nowadays, sad but true.

	▲	rbehrends an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Junie is an agent. The AI Assistant is the UI for agents (typically in a sidebar). You can switch to other agents if you want (such as Codex or Claude Code), and there are actually a ton that you can add with just a few mouse clicks. Example: https://gist.github.com/rbehrends/4d9febe5c5c008961b309dd4a6... The "Install From ACP Registry ..." allow you to use pi, OpenCode, Kilo Code, Cline, Cursor, Copilot (and a ton of other agents that I've never heard of) if you want.