All the death knell comments - Is no one looking at the revenue line? Revenue still trending the same. Costs presumably haven't skyrocketed. They've invested in something big. Thats probably a good thing, and often needed to evolve.
Yeah look at the details below. Revenue is up 6% (which is not amazing but still growth). But staff expenses are up 34.2%. And the real big hint is "Cash Flow From Investing" plunging from -83 million $USD to -469. That's massive. They're staffing up and investing in... something.
I still have this naive notion that we don't need LLMs for code generation and editing. Does a system need the knowledge of the full works of Shakespeare to be able to output Javascript?
Maybe people smarter than me know better but couldn't there be a middle ground where an IDE/Editor has an embedded engine (doesn't need to be a full-on LLM) that doesn't require external tool calls and token spend?
If an organization is paying $2400/year per developer for tokens and a highly intelligent editor/IDE comes around that charges $1000/yr and gets more output at a fixed cost, its a no-brainer of a decision.
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.
I was inclined to listen to your take… then you started talking about having 6 graphics cards in your computer and acting like that’s a normal thing that people do…
The other pitfall here is that we are tempted to compare this crazy setup to frontier models when the real comparison is running this same model in OpenRouter.
This 6 GPU setup will probably outspend OpenRouter on electricity alone.
These are 6 year old cards as one poster below pointed out. It is a normal thing people do, and many more people would if the prices were not made bonkers by few large companies vacuuming entire advanced chips manufacturing capacity just to lock those chips in warehouses.
If all those nvidia gpus the hyperscalers bought were online the cost to rent a single b200 wouldn't be $50 and hour and you could buy those 6 year old gpus I use for $200 each. Not almost $2k a pop they sold for now.
A 180gb b200 on runpod is $6.8/hr. Nowhere near $50/hr.
The _most expensive_ on-demand b200 rental I can find is $11.2/hr. There's a number of websites around these days that track GPU rental prices across different services: gpus.io, gpu.watchworks.dev (vast and runpod only), gputracker.net (not free, lol), gpurentalprices.com, priceofcompute.com, rentgpu.org, etc (I'm only looking at the first page of search results for GPU rental prices tracker search). Most of these don't include vast or runpod, but all of them show prices under $10, mostly around $6/hr for b200.
Keep in mind that GPU iteration cycles are slowing down significantly for some time now, so "a GPU from 2020" can actually mean NVIDIA RTX 3090 with 24 GB VRAM, one of the best cards you can buy in 2026 for local LLM use; in fact buying one used is probably the best choice right now, because newer generation RTXes are crazy expensive.
My GPUS are Rtx3090s with 24GB ram. You guessed correctly.
I do not enjoy the fact those cards cost more than their msrp 6 years later, but there is a much more important consideration than money (which also makes sense, but about that later). It is the fact soon people will not be able to do my job without AI at all. Even now if I didn't use it I think I'd be out competed very quickly.
And having the ability to run it locally, using a really useful, not toy model is very useful. It makes you independent from Anthropic deciding to ban your account for example.
As for money, it is an open secret the biggest cost of coding agents use is input tokens not generation. I tend to use about 1.3B input tokens per week on claude code with only 7-8M out. Out if this 80% is cached. And the cache is pretty restrictive. You have 5min cache and 1h cache. If you don't keep reading over that time your cache expires on the cloud. Then your 500k context counts as 500k input in its entirety.
And the numbers I mentioned would cost thousands of USD a week at API prices.
But when you control inference, you can keep your cache for as long as you want and save it to disk.
I tend to have up to 10 coding agent sessions open at a time. Some are used once a week. I never use more than 5 at the same moment. Having 15 full contexts cached in RAM basically moves my local cache utilisation to 95%+
Basically I think the AI companies will soon require us to pay the real price for the inference. I prefer to be ready.
I have two. I paid <$1000 for each, before this craziness started. They work, sure, but 48GB of VRAM is just not enough to use a local LLM like a cloud model.
we use that same model at our company, it powers not only our devs but also many business needs. We rent 1 gpu (B300), it costs around 10x less than the api costs
Do you rent from AWS or some other provider? I wonder if there are issues with on-demand rent for those high-end GPU instances, is capacity always there or sometimes it is unavailable?
Not the person to whom you responded, but several times I have been dealing with debugging. Issue, tried. Opus/Sol/whatever and come up dry, then thrown it at Fable and gotten the solution in one shot.
One example of a "hobby grade" problem that only fable could resolve that I had no time to mess around with.
I have a home network consisting of multiple buildings, a server room with a k8 cluster and various devices, some Cctv cameras, redundant fiber links between buildings, ftth Internet and lte backup, and so on. Not a simple network. All on Mikrotik switches using a lot of modern features like L3 in hardware routing. All properly designed, servers are multi homed with 10G DAC cables between switched.
Occasionally I'd notice few second drops when observing Cctv from my cameras on the monitor attached to my pc. Pc on the 10G.
Also occasionally I'd get random devices (android TV) decide "it has no Internet) for a minute at a time.
Also occasionally I'd have my AI take 20s to answer when I know for a fact it is doing absolutely nothing.
First I looked into it myself and I found nothing. No misconfiguration etc. Then I used opus with it. It found no network drops on any interfaces etc. But it wrote a script that opened 10k connections, kept them open and sent traffic through them. This was tried to all my k8 nodes and one node would occasionally refuse to open 0.1% of these connections.
Opus decided it must be a network card or a DAC cable. It took ages to identify which. I replaced both, problem went away for weeks each time and then returned every time.
Opus had a bajillion ideas to mess with my network config. Thankfully I know enough about networking not to let it take me on a wild goose chase.
Then I used Fable. Fable took 5 minutes and found the server grade Nic card's driver I use has a known rare problem where in certain configuration the default memory buffers for some hardware offload feature are too small for it and when connections get opened rapidly it sometimes chokes.
But there are two nodes with exact same config. Why only one was affected? Actually both were affected, but on one it was so rare I had to run the testing for hours to notice it.
The memory was increased and the problem... Became a lot rarer. Not resolved completely.
Fable again. This time it came up with an idea there must be a bug in the active/standby part of the driver where it occasionally let's some traffic through the standby interface. Which makes the switches ARP learn the standby as the correct path to that mac and send a portion of that traffic there, but the standby couldn't receive traffic.
It setup tcpdump on both the standby and live and proved indeed it was happening. I do not remember how this was resolved, but it was and for last 4 weeks the problem is gone.
I have actual programming problems too. 4 of which I turned into a personal Ai benchmark. Only fable solves all 4.
> Does a system need the knowledge of the full works of Shakespeare to be able to output Javascript?
Turns out that actually - no. Researchers have managed to prune half the Experts in a MoE model that had a low probability of getting activated during coding tasks, resulting in a more focused model:
Main benefit is that it greatly reduces the amount of RAM required to run these models. Of course you could just cache those unused experts on disk instead, but the main point here is that you know which ones matter.
But aside from that recent models, like Qwen3.8-27b are reportedly more durable under heavy quantisation, e.g. 3bits or even ternary. With additional techniques like TurboQuant, you can feasibly run these models on consumer hardware - even if at 1/4th the speed you'd get from rented infrastructure.
VS Code has extensions such as Kilo Code or llama-vscode which let you work with local models much like you would with cloud based solutions.
> "Does a system need the knowledge of the full works of Shakespeare to be able to output Javascript?"
If the implementation brief says "attempting a reconnect in this handler would be a wild goose chase", the model needs to know enough Shakespeare, at least indirectly, to understand that expression...
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.
Depends on what exactly you want to change. Lsp can do a lot but only in very simple changes.
Intellij when I used to use it had a lot great features like refactoring, extracting part of code as a function, renaming and creating empty classes/boilerplate but that's it
In current job I can order LLM to take data sink from other endpoint and write new with given URL. It will fetch from endpoint, check what it gives, compare with other and write new sink. Then it needs polishing because it always create something as awful as possible with cloning data all around but the most boring and soul sucking part is done
This is why I am working on https://github.com/spockz/semantic-editor. To bring more powerful editing functionality to agents. In a way that attaches to their chain of thought and deals with their probabilistic framing in json so it all works out cheaper and faster.
LLMs at my work have access to Slack chat history, the Wiki, the complete git history, (AI generated) notes from every in person meeting team meeting, JIRA, all code reviews, and all production logs, as well as your personal email (when you run it yourself)
They can typically explain the history of something faster than any human
How does your agent wire all the information? Does it use MCP for all of them or do you use another method to access or collect the data? and how does it resolve contradictions (one source say one thing, another say otherwise).
It's a totally fair question. I'm personally wondering if there's a half way point. Some kind of structured language that isn't plain English that a "dumb" LLM is able to parse. It could be human written, or it could be written by a "smart" LLM at a greater cost.
Looking at what Jev has shown, and what is being done in the space. I think you are right that there’s probably a lot of room for performance improvement on specific tasks and workflows that will be happening in the next few years
I also imagine it could be a big shakeup if all of a sudden models could run on CPU. Imagine running an Astra-level coding agent, locally on your laptop. All of a sudden GPUs wouldn’t look as valuable, if you don’t need them as much
We are still some time away from that, but it seems like progress is being made
We’re conditioned to interact with language models as chatbots and in that sense strong language understanding (implicit - some sort of world knowledge), is probably necessary for that?
But I’m sure we can have a small model that’s really strong at programming concepts, JavaScript syntax, and that’s about it. You’d interact with it differently, at specific seams in your code base - review a PR, merge two functions together, investigate these logs.
Or maybe I’m just not adequately absorbing the bitter lesson. Idk
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.
No kidding. As a small employer I expect to be spending $200 a month so each employee can have an OAI or Claude 20x sub, or else spend it on the Chinese prepaid tokens of their choice.
I have a feeling that when all the AI-hype dust settles, what you describe will be the killer app of AI. That, ChatBots and unstructured data processing. Huge productivity improvements but not the sci-fi hype of today.
I don't need AI in the same way that I don't need autocomplete. I can definitely program without autocompletion, but I'm a lot slower than others who use it
> Does a system need the knowledge of the full works of Shakespeare to be able to output Javascript?
The same can be said about software engineers. The tricky thing is, it's hard to separate a subset of knowledge from the whole, for both human beings and LLMs
It is very difficult to predict ahead of time what knowledge a model would need to understand a prompt to generate a program. It could refer to all kinds of real world knowledge referring to the kinds of entities you want the program to model.
That might be a bad example ... replace english with nearly anything not related to prompting/coding. For example, I bet the models have "knowledge" of biology, chemistry, etc. not exactly useful for programming a SaaS web app that say does project mgmt. I think there's opportunity for very specific tooling rather than "general" knowledge.
I don't train LLMs myself, but my impression is that general knowledge has lead to more intelligent behavior on specific tasks. The voluminous training set is imporant.
But even besides that... Yesterday I prompted a feature by referencing a specific Monty Python skit. Does the coding tool need to know Monty Python? Maybe I could describe the feature in other terms, but it sure was convenient to have this shared knowledge. I don't see why Shakespeare would be any different.
Everything around "desired machine physics" is superfluous wank; historically a biz case stored as code when some UI could feed biz case params go a function generator
Come on we know what we use computers for; media consumption and 2D data entry/review. Locally we just need a core engine for geometric transforms of visual state. What all these languages give us ability to create such a generic VM filled with customized semantics that mean nothing to solving the problem but plenty to a clever coder.
Kind of like Unicode we need distilled geometry primitives like "teapot for text" and desktop metaphors and to let people put the superfluous wank at the presentation layer
Which text used to be so making UI out of layers of text, OOP, and such made sense for decades
But we're just engaged in bloating system state through def jargon_to_encapsulate { desired machine physics } when we already know it's going to be simulated 3D or 2D visual transforms. We don't need to capture all those states in code verbatim.
Things like Jev are the future of models. Fine tuned on transforms given a context. "So you want to replicate GTA5? Here's a data set of geometric shapes and gradients constraints from all observed xyz" pipe that into your local renderer
We're entering the phase of software engineering (and engineering generally) where we realized we been dramatically over playing the song and can strip out entire asides and digressions, circumlocutions of provenance, to tighten up pacing and improve enjoyment of the outcomes. Hopefully. Or we kill ourselves. Through social squabbles (political, economic, religious, whatever) due to laziness to learn etiquette, and environmental destruction.
Well, the post I’m replying to says that English was learned first, and I’m saying that I learned Perl before I learned English.
I don't think LLM needs to know Shakespeare to understand: "attempting a reconnect in this handler would be a wild goose chase." I would even bet that most people learned of this expression before reading Romeo and Julie.
1. Storing Shakespeare's work costs almost no $ in regards to disk space.
2. If the prompt doesn't include "Shakespeare" or relevant terms then no regression is performed for that topic and therefore there is no effective token cost.
Someone may correct me, but I think it's not a big $ win to exclude relevant topics from the models' overall capabilities. Instead you'd tune weights so that #2 better identifies what is or isn't among the relevant terms on which to run regressions.
I think you're probably missing the forest for the trees here... broadly speaking, these multibillion "parameter" (whatever that actually means) models store a lot more than shakespeare, and have storage costs in the 100s of GB/TB (which translates to $$$$$$ in SSD/RAM costs), nevermind the (kilos/mega/giga)watts involved, all the pollution, etc...
Meanwhile, a template (maybe a couple KB) costs less than a couple cents to store and run. Large Languages Models are not really interesting, (smaller) LLMs that only contain "what you need" are.
To me it feels like the difference between crows and humans. Yes crows are smart, but what we really want are all inclusive models capable of human "thinking" . I guess we probably need a mix of both so we can give the crows the easy jobs freeing up resources.
Right but if the cost difference is negligible, as I've pointed out in another comment, in what case would you prefer to tell the crow twice to do something that a better weighted large model could do in one prompt?
I don't see it. In every case my time is more valuable than the cost of the prompt (so far) so the higher dollar cost, one shot, "getter done" model is the better net value option.
This is especially true when taking into account that the crow doesn't just fail on a single prompt, it does something much worse. It creates new problems that need to be undone afterwards. It confidently duplicates, triplicates, etc. a damaging work output that then needs more and more work to clean up before starting over.
Claude Fable 5.1 currently estimates its own total data set at 45TB.
That's a trivial number for sharing between a small user base of, in my case, 150 employees.
What am I missing? You're talking about maybe $60k retail cost in high read speed SANs that are likely already in place for a business of this size anyway? (Probably purchased a few years ago for under $30k. At least mine are.) In a US data center I'm paying a flat rate for rack space, so power consumption isn't a consideration anyway, but honestly it really isn't that much power even if I was being billed for it.
It's really nothing. An overlooked line item on a budget sheet.
So the real cost if I were to self host is video cards. But as mentioned previously, that's not reduced by smaller data sets, it's reduced by better weighted models, right? Let me know if I'm mistaken, please.
I'm very interested to be persuaded otherwise as a decision maker. Thanks for your insight and ideas.
Considering all of the above, I'm currently of the mind that a lower cost model that makes more mistakes is much more expensive in net, actually. So I prefer the most accurate, better weighted model, not the slimmer data set.
> Maybe people smarter than me know better but couldn't there be a middle ground where an IDE/Editor has an embedded engine (doesn't need to be a full-on LLM) that doesn't require external tool calls and token spend?
IDEA already have small LLM for one line code completion IIRC.
But the gain people want from LLM is generally "here, add this entire feature" or "here, go thru every dependency's changelog and update code to work with latest version". Those are not small LLM tasks
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;
My gut says the economics, e.g hardware/data center/resource constraints, are going make the economics of small specialized models more attractive. Without any evidence whatsoever, I also think that the big frontier companies will have to de-emphasize chatbots as huge models in favor of chatbots as huge products with a much much more granular mixture of experts approach, but with much smaller models. I’ve been saying for a while now that AI products have to hit the gas on prioritizing product design to reliably solve real people’s problems in predictable-enough ways, because the current approach is only really appealing to enthusiasts, developers, or optimistic managers, and with the kind of money they’re throwing around, that’s not going to work.
My gut is that you could distill 98% of what's currently being done inside LLMs into a classical knowledge base/inference engine and only use the language models for natural language processing and an oracle for brainstorming and cut most of the computational cost and hallucinations out.
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.
These specialized tools already deliver tremendous value. What happens on the backend financially is of no concern to me, as I have no influence over it.
I think they're in the perfect position to take a stab at actually monetizing a "just-works-and-good-enough" local code-assistant that works well enough to save people on burning tokens with the big providers and/or keeping their data offline for regulatory reasons (ie also selling to customers that CANNOT use Claude or OpenAI).
1: Local models are catching up quickly
2: Visual Studio Intellicode (not to be confused with Intellisense) was/is surprisingly good at suggestions (when it first appeared before people went over to CLI's I felt that it was almost magically good for it's time, turned off co-pilot and whatever backend for a reason of compliance for a local workspace and the suggestions are quite good still even if not on the same level as the frontier suggestions).
If it pans out, with their brand people many would probably be happy to fork over for a Jetbrains licence.
To do nothing is to die. I've been a JetBrains subscriber for over a decade. Nobody is going to use their tools in five years. I certainly don't need my subscription anymore.
> on some "also ran" LLM sinkhole.
They can't do Junie. It's a dead end. They can't do the same thing everyone else is doing either, or they're exactly as you put it: an "also ran" in a very crowded field.
The only way for JetBrains to survive is to figure out their Garmin play. They either find some niche within the existing product or - maybe (and very improbably) - they can innovate something wild nobody else has figured out yet that provides a path to new fertile pasture. But that's more the startup path than the thriving incumbent facing innovator's dilemma path.
But no matter what, if they stay the course, they're dead. Just like half the people expecting to still be writing code by hand.
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 :-)
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.
Can't agents just use a language server? There are already a bunch of projects that provide this, e.g.: https://www.agent-lsp.com/
Doesn't seem like a huge differentiator anymore?
I don't really know much about their current users, but from a business perspective, post-tokenmaxxing and them having an IDE, it seems like the most efficient environment for having a human in the loop is something they could tackle?
Well nobody needs to use IDE. There were always people who used vim with tmux as their IDE. The value of IDE is the I as in integrated - I see some value in having easy to manage single dev environment with batteries included. (I'm not an IDE guy though, and I personally closer to vim/vscode + plugins)
There were always people who used vim with tmux as their IDE.
But until language servers, IDEs with built-in code analysis had a huge advantage. This stopped once LSP was designed and some language servers got mature. LSP was developed originally by VS Code and it is easy to see why - it allowed VS Code to compete with IDEs without writing their own code analysis by letting language developers write a standard server. This made VS Code (and others like Zed) so powerful, that they had already replaced IDEs for many users (maybe outside Java). LLMs are just another nail in the coffin.
No, it didn't stop. In my experience, LSPs are still incredibly poor and comparatively primitive vs the actual analysis that JetBrains have implemented. It's night-and-day different in terms of the supported refactorings, actual understanding of the types and the codebase etc.
Also, LSP is just poorly designed and inefficient. JSON-RPC was an awful choice, the specification text is not well-written and the whole thing feels like a Microsoft pet project for VS Code than an open specification that everyone agrees works well.
I think the name misleads people about LSPs. LSPs are basically plugins for VS Code. The protocol semantics are visual, so they're tied to what VS Code wanted to display on screen. They don't really change the game, especially as you always had the option of using IDEA's own plugins in other tools and text editors (yes! there is an API and you can start up a headless IDEA to access it, even from programs written in C or Rust).
Not many did that because JetBrains never cared much to properly document this path, and so using LSPs is a better paved cowpath. But that's because IDEs aren't a real business for Microsoft, whereas they are for JetBrains, and we know where that leads - the landscape is filled with the skeletons of dead IDEs that were just loss making corporate side projects, defunded and "donated" to some foundation once the executive sponsors moved on. NetBeans and Eclipse are two of the most obvious but there have been others.
The risk with VS Code is it goes the same way. Eventually Microsoft needs to cut back, perhaps due to needing more capital for AI or due to AI related losses, and in the general layoffs that follow VS Code gets cut back to a skeleton crew.
This is not the whole picture. IDE is not just for writing code. What I really like on jetbrains is how strong the platform is. I will show you example which would be great if they implement it.
If you use ideavim you can enable feature which shows you action ID you have currently triggered (Ideavim: Track action IDs). If you click on anything it will show you name of that action and you can setup vim shortcut for that. This way, you can use almost anything by just typing a few letters. But that is just a start.
Now imagine you can use this to create "macro" which will create something like skill for LLM. So in a few seconds to minutes you can create "skills"/runbooks for major refactorings, project updates, git bisections, project deployments, log analysis or whatever you can think of. You will just click on 20 features and it will record what you did with some additional context (files, connected services, build systems etc.). This is the strength of integrated tools.
Of course this is just my imagination but I am not the smartest person in the world and I am pretty sure/hope that someone in jetbrains or in other IDE company is thinking this way.
You envision a world in which humans don't look at code.
I think that world is farther off than you think, especially in critical line of business software. You can YOLO it with your internal dashboard or your hipster coffee review site, but in my 2M-line highly regulated banking system, humans sign off on the code - even if LLMs do most of the typing.
And their MCP servers and tools are great! But I wish they’d remember that some of us also actually code in the IDE, because human usage quality of their IDEs has been getting worse in that time…
You are right, they fix even most annoying bugs really slowly. I also remember something like 2 years ago when they made pycharm unusable with poetry for several months and the release was like 18th of December (who decided to release tool for work as Christmas gift :-D ). The good thing is that you can always revert to older version and wait for proper fix.
Not using tooling (or not creating one) for repeating tasks and trying to one shot everything with latest frontier model is a difference between the bill for AI usage being 10 Eur or 10000 Eur
While I "vibe code" more and more these days, an IDE that still does code highlighting, I can use it to look up functions source and so on, it is very useful to be able to figure out what the LLM did.
And yes, there are people who use vim in a screen session, but I don't fit into that category. I like my GoLand IDE.
And while there are a ton of IDEs out there, I use what I'm used to.
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.
> 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 remember around 2019 or so they shipped their first AI feature and there was a huge backlash for it. Did that change their direction in anyway? Obviously 2026 is a way different landscape than back then.
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.
I look at it as like being able to start a fire in the woods without a lighter. It’s a skill, a helpful one even on the extremely rare occasions that it’s necessary. But realistically with even the bare minimum amount of prep, not a useful one.
How many people out there can do hand lithography to make an 8086 to bootstrap computing? One?
> How many people out there can do hand lithography to make an 8086 to bootstrap computing? One?
What does THAT have to do with whether people who dont use AI today will die soon? What does "hand lithography" have to do with literally anything here?
They picked weird direction. "Here, pay ENTIRE EXTRA SUB to use the LLM we made that is worse than one you're already using".
Yeah, no, vast majority just want to pick a AI vendor and integrate it into their IDEA or CLion or whatever other editor they were already using. Pushing into entirely different subscription was dead on arrival.
They figured that out and started integrating it into main tooling (https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/33314-air), but they definitely wasted a bunch of resources on something nobody really wanted.
This was so annoying as a long time subscriber- we were begging them to get / let us integrate some of the more mainstream models - didn’t help that there early model was terrible
> 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!)
I'm not a fan of VS Code myself, but everyone I know uses it (except for people I myself have influenced into using something else). It truly is a sort of default editor these days.
I guess it depends on your niche; I spend half my time coding Golang and Python, and the other half terraform, ansible, perl and I use other languages now and again for small projects and utilities.
In the devops/sysadmin world my stack would be common, and mostly people pick an editor and stick to it. I've been using Emacs for the past 20+ years at this point, and the last time I used Microsoft's IDE was back in the day when I was writing desktop apps using MFC (which probably dates me pretty well!) with visual studio.
I've seen colleagues use anything from atom, vim, emacs, notepad++, and other generic editors whos name I didn't recognize. There are one or two instances of VS Code I see now and again, but they're the outlier rather than the norm in my professional life.
I was a big IDE user since they existed (I used Visual C++ beta releases in 1992). However, since adopting AI tools I really haven't used an IDE. Once in a while for things I don't know how to do without one (e.g. view a markdown file locally). That's it though.
Most of their products have an AI harness embedded and it works well, at least for me. Has tools to let the models access proper debugging too(my experience is Clion) so that my build is available to them even when using remote/docker builds. The integration with codex works well too.
They host a lot of models too, and that is probably where they burned the cash.
Cost of services is up. I suspect that's where the token cost comes into play, but they didn't "invest" in tokens. They can't call that an investment anyway. The increase in cost of services relative to revenue impacts net income - we can see that in prior years - but that's not the whole story. Total assets on the balance sheet increased at the same time net income decreased. They spent money on something of value.
Could they label that as investing in such a report? Sounds misleading. Investing to me means paying for something you then own afterwards, paying for AI sounds like a normal expense.
No idea why they thought they can compete with frontier AI labs on that, it's entirely waste of money
They also tried to push AI feature set as a separate subscription which is just insane in current tooling market.
All users wanted is good integration of multi-AI providers in their base offering. I think they are slowly shifting to that but that's a lot of money wasted already
They integrated air recently into intellij, and I believe it's quite fruitful. You can use any agent you want, they can work locally, in separate worktrees, or remotely and you can switch between them, and merge their results back properly.
> ...the real big hint is "Cash Flow From Investing" plunging from -83 million $USD to -469. That's massive. They're staffing up and investing in... something.
...or they're bailing out of really bad investments before they become even worse ones...
> They're staffing up and investing in... something
You're suggesting "investing" is like R&D?
Investing is when you buy stocks or bitcoin and hope. Except for 1 year, their "investments" have always lost, last year about 50% of total assets:
-908 -4,374 3,970 -1,946 -10,273
"Investing" is traditionally how money is skimmed: something's sold to a friend at an inflated price that only becomes recognized as such years later amidst some other cover/crisis (if not after a statute of limitations). The other option is sweetheart deals - unneeded property leases, jobs for friends, etc. - but those are a bit more traceable, while investments can have multiple shell-company layers and complex derivatives.
Apparently, no one commenting knows how to read financial statements. They look at one item and assume the company is going out of business. Meanwhile, their total assets have increased. Cost of services have increased significantly over recent years - mostly commensurate with revenue growth, although the gap has been shrinking. Operating costs have been pretty flat. I don't have time to investigate where they spent the money, but the company is not at risk. They brought in more money than in prior years and spent it on something. That's it.
Jetbrains has been pushing Junie real hard, my guess is that they've been giving out too many cheap tokens to try to stay relevant as Claude and friends pull people away from the IDE.
In everyone's day jobs where they used an IDE 5 years ago, or even a year ago, are those jobs abandoning the IDE?
I still use Visual Studio in my day job, where Claude's output while VERY helpful, requires my ownership of everything, meaning I am inspecting every single line it changes. If a change is bigger than I think it should, I kill it before I commit.
I know I don't HAVE to use an IDE for that, but if the change is small enough, I am faster than asking Claude to understand the subtext behind my personal context of the product, and the IDE is supremely helpful for making a quick change across a handful of files.
> meaning I am inspecting every single line it changes.
I think this is changing fast. Pressure is increasing on devs for output, and most devs I know are no longer inspecting lines. I have devs in my business unit who claim to not have looked at code for months, except on certain rare occasions. I am not a developer and this week I've been given access to the repo to build my own apps and extensions. There's a "review" between commit and deploy, but there's no chance the Tech Lead can manually review everything, so that's getting done by AI too.
I know this horrifies a lot of devs, but these tools are shockingly good and we are not seeing an increase in bugs. In fact our automated detections (also AI assisted) are reducing the number of customer reported critical bugs.
I really think the days of inspecting every line are over.
This type of codebases will become a goldmine for cybersec in the near future. Except by then, only few people will be able to detect them or fix them. LLMs will leave the hardest problems and most difficult bugs plus and plethora of devs who either have skill atrophy or haven't learn these things in the first place.
Actually, cybersecurity seems to be the area that LLMs shine the most at; though it needs directing to actually look for the problem, LLMs have been able to find security faults in code that is well-vetted and written by experts.
I don’t think this is accurate. Our AI testing is finding exploits we’ve had in our codebase for 15 years. No human ever detected it. No deterministic tests. Our apps are getting more secure, not less.
It's an interesting philosophic question. LLMs tend to be overly verbose and defensive in coding. It's not a ton of extra complexity but it makes the code harder to follow for a human. But if a human is not writing the code how much does that matter?
I agree that they have gotten shockingly good. It's been a long time since I've seen them do something that is objectively wrong. Once we get closer to the "too cheap to meter" cost level things will change radically again.
Have you ever tried to use an LLM to add a feature to a really nice, pre 2023 codebase? It’s incredible how much easier it is to do, how much of a difference you instantly feel
> It's not a ton of extra complexity but it makes the code harder to follow for a human.
It is. I have seen Claude chasing after endless amount of edge cases that are just irrelevant in real usage especially for the kind of users we are supporting. At some point you need to stop reasoning about all those cases because it has zero benefit.
But it IS a ton of complexity and blows out context windows. Less code good. More code bad. Both for human and agent. Somehow, still only human can make code less.
Yes and….no. I have seen this play out at a large corp to spectacularly awful results. Talking 60k line react nextjs apps where every use effect has a linter silenced because the ai gave up on writing correct react code.
I have seen millions wasted because someone trusted an ai scripts calculation of a metric from the bottom of the org that led the top of the org to make a wrong decision only to laugh about ai. There is value but ffs read the god damn code. You can have the cake and eat it too. If the volume of code is so large you cannot read it, maybe it isnt worth shipping?
Or are you one of the ones pushing the real code reading on to others which seems to be common. Yes i can have agents vibe out 10 features and have my coworkers suffer fixing it in reviews.
What IS useful are the AI reviews. They catch bugs, not all are bugs but they do catch some. It is almost like they are better at finding logical issues across millions of tokens but not good at writing streamlined logic.
The number of times ai gives me a 800 line dif only to replace it with a 5 line dif after i read it and notice it grossly overcomplicated the ask and scoped in a bunch of nonsense from training data.
I'm beginning to abandon the IDE (vscode in my case). I've always been very comfortable with (or at least not scared of) the command line so the Claude app with a terminal pane open is handling much of my IDE use cases. What I really need to do is get better at using find, grep, and other search tools from the terminal and then create a good .vimrc for editing and i'm set. heh what's old is new again!
> I am inspecting every single line it changes.
Honestly, when I'm looking at ClaudeCode's output 75% of time i'm doing it to learn and understand and not just check for correctness. I'm confident enough to admit I don't know everything and I've learned a lot from reading Claude's code.
I had personal subscriptions to WebStorm and GoLand and cancelled them not long after getting Windsurf. Just don't need the IDE abilities like I used to... Still use 'go to definition' but that's pretty much it.
IMO what's being called an 'Agent Development Environment' solves this issue for you. I like Orca but there's a few dozen of them.
Basically they give you a way to view the code the llm has generated/changed easily, annotate that code for the llm, and manage multiple agents and at once.
And with LLMs you can just create your own pretty easily that matches your exact workflow and integrates with all your tools. I've gone through a few iterations, first using the Unix small tools that talk to each other philosophy, then a single TUI app running in a pane next to my agent cli and now a Go server that has a cli and web ui with xterm embedded terminals and has its own chat sidebar in the web ui that can use tools and interact with running sessions in terminals. I'll probably have something new in 6 months.
Yes that is a real problem at work. A lot of stuff is done in containers or virtual devices and jetbrains remote developping workflow takes too much time due to this transfer. VsCode is much faster there.
Yes. Github draft PRs for giving inline feedback to agents, then going back to chat window with agents in Cursor, Claude, Codex, etc. to say 'review my comments and address them'.
I tried it in DataGrip on a messy database. It hallucinated about which tables and columns to use. Had better results using Claude in the terminal and having it give me the SQL to run.
I use it daily, but I'm also the AI consumer that is looking for something like a hammer and a saw (it's clear what their job are and they're doing their job fine). I'm absolutelty not looking for the next-gen-stuff, so I avoid Codex/Claude/...
I think Junie is comparable to something like Claude Code or Codex, but moving a little slower feature wise. It's perfectly adequate for developers who want to use AI but don't want to keep up with the bleeding edge of tooling.
It felt quite competitive about a year ago. But haven't tried it since, no idea how it has held up with the other advancing. What I liked was the tight integration with the IDE. I don't particularly like the way I work with Claude now, still wanting to check the changes, navigate code, ask questions, write some code myself etc. Feel claude mostly is for the "bigger" changes. Sometimes I just want to select some text and refactor it, or ask a stupid simple question without the "chat".
Worked fine as a free tool, but as long as AI companies are selling their slopware tokens below cost with subscriptions, it's not really that interesting in my opinion.
The Jetbrains integration is nice, but if you rely on the tool you're probably not going to use the IDE much anyway.
Not personally but Junie was what made the fellow developer I respect most in the world actually start taking notice of LLMs as something useful instead of bad.
It is alright to get an LLM review on code I write myself, but getting extra tokens is expensive, and it was not clear if I could configure it to use one of the API keys I have from GLM, MiMo, etc.
I tried Air as well. It was alright, but I found it a bit more cumbersome to use then Pi. I tried configuring Pi to be accessed though ACP, but it felt like going through a hoop to have a worse experience. Then again, I am not someone that manages multiple agents in parallel, at most I have one agent implementing something in a different repository while I am doing my own things.
Air could maybe be useful for me if I could plug in the LLMs I actually use directly, it is too tied to ChatGPT, Claude, etc.
I enjoyed it a lot early on. In particular it didn’t have all the confusing and anxiety inducing options that other agents have to use more expensive or less expensive models, I liked the way it approached “plan mode” [1] and I didn’t feel like I had to stress it about token costs the way I do with the other models…. Jetbrains now gives me a choice of agents which I don’t like because having to think about it makes feel like one of those “ai bros” who is overthinking their relationship to ai and underthinking their code.
I would like to see one more ide-integrated, like I think running commands like ‘grep’ with the shell is really for the birds (creates a risk that some other command line might be run, the wrong files might be accessed, all that) and rather there should be a specialized toolbox.
[1] … I reject vibe coding. Token costs be damned but I always like to have a talk before it starts like “I think…, maybe you should…, does this make sense?, do you have any questions for me before you start?” and later “what are you doing in the code in the selection?”
Yeah, mind blowing after reading some comments which wen to conclusions without thininkg...
Look at the report (or point your clankers at it), not the saased helgi-pay-me-for-more, but free, full at CZ corporate registry. few tidbits from my fast (error prone) readin:
- main reason of net income loss is currency movement in 2025(CZK vs USD). eg. if they hold USD, they report loss without money moving. The other was bigger costs (but look below)
- they have 6% rev growth but ONLY in this CZK entity, whole group is whooping 25% up
- investing was lending (to subsidiaries) and outflow to bank deposits (sic!)
- cost increase impacting operating profit was from:
- “Other services”: +1,941, to 4,941.
- Consulting: +482, to 601.
- Marketing: +428, to 2,146
- Software development: -1,025, to 3,216
Looks fine for me and definitely not ai-doom-scenario.
Why are investments considered losses? It always seemed unintuitive to me as a layman. You made the profit and it's free to use however you want... investing it is a loss?
Or more likely, they're burning cash trying to chase the AI train to no avail while their core product stagnates, which is definitely not a good thing.
The war in Ukraine and subsequent move to Czechia did seem to hurt them pretty badly, but I wouldn't say they are stagnant. I've been a happy customer of PHPStorm for years and it continues to improve.
If your existing, well-established product is at risk due to new, competing products that do things in radically different ways, immediately dropping your product to chase the competition from way behind is usually not the right move. Unless you have a significant moat around your ecosystem, what reason do users have to adopt your inferior copy instead of the thing you copied?
I firmly believe JetBrains would have a better chance of survival if they stopped chasing the AI hype and got back to work on their IDEs, accepting the fact that they'll have less users than before. Right now, they're completely lost.
I only kept the current sub because models are not quite there, but to be fair I haven't opened Rider for 6 months. VS community is faster and is sufficient to do a quick fix of agent written code in terminal cases.
Probably AI spend and increased developer cost (salary + AI subscription cost). And the increase in memory prices means procuring IT assets has sky-rocketed too.
I would assume the margins they operated on, evaporated with the AI bubble.
Now it's Claude Code and ever so occasionally Codex.
I never do work in IDEs by hand anymore. I stopped writing code entirely in February and I will likely never write code again unless my internet dies.
I need a JetBrains-level AST navigator that focuses on high level code navigation and understanding, and moreover on code and architectural review. I need to quickly scan diffs and quickly see architecture at a glance.
Of course even that too many eventually fall away.
I rarely open RustRover these days. I could never have predicted that.
I "code" using Codex but I still use PHPStorm for checking diffs, database access, reviewing PRs, and the debugger. The value proposition has changed, not disappeared.
> I "code" using Codex but I still use PHPStorm for checking diffs, database access, reviewing PRs, and the debugger. The value proposition has changed, not disappeared.
You are able to do this while the output is small enough. But, it will not stay small for long. Business expectations are rising fast. To stay competitive, you have to push large amounts of code/fixes/features. There is no way to manually review it or QA it. If your org is not there yet, it will eventually get there. Or it will die out. It is only a matter of time.
I'm on the opinion that if it's "code review" and code is not properly checked out than it's just a meat linter phase that's almost completely useless with meaningless style disagreements.
I've been paying for the all products pack for 8 years now, but at my latest job all code is generated, and I think this will be the reality at most companies. I won't extend this year
If you've been on HN long enough you recognize that the OP is quite prolific in making absurd claims about AI: infamously predicted that children would be making professional, Hollywood level films by the end of 2025, and is now spending their time building the 5000th barely functional clone of Adobe tools[0]. It's probably a little unfair, but they are bold claims from someone who really does not have the ground to be making bold claims.
You don't get the nuance that there are people who enjoy the writing the code part more than they enjoy the handholding and hitting enter on a prompt part. And they write it fast or concise enough to not need to prompt engineer bicker with a machine.
And as soon as an edge case pops up that your model will have never been able to hear about because it hasn't been released publicly, security vuln, whatever, you'll get a "fix" confidently hallucinated at you and be none the wiser.
There's going to be a huge pendulum swing with all the llm zombies and sanewashing it like this isn't helping anyone.
All of this just oozes junior engineer if you're even employed in the field at all.
I do get that some people enjoy the manual process more than they enjoy building the product.
It doesn't give you the right to insult my expertise, and frankly your arguments sound like things that one would make up despite little actual experience using AI to develop software.
How can one insult something one knows nothing about. Tell us what sort of expert are you instead of patting yourself on the back. Anybody can come here and claim they're bigger experts than you. Will you believe them? Maybe you're a big ego with rubbish "engineering" skills.
A large percentage thinks that the current status quo is how things will look over the next decade. They don't think everything is fundamentally and irreversibly changing.
Nobody is coming out of this with the same career. The whole world is being rewired. Some people really don't like that.
I'm just glad we're out of the web platform / cellphone incrementalism era. I wish more of my career could have been spent with this rocket fuel. It's dangerous and hypergolic, but it's fun and flashy and capable of pulling us out of this gravity well.
> Is no one looking at the revenue line? Revenue still trending the same.
Yes. Companies have been looking at nothing but revenue for over 10 years now. You realize that a sustainable company has to look at net profit at some point?
A bit tongue-in-cheek but I'm amazed by people that don't open an IDE or look at code. Are you paid to press enter at anything that Claude present to you?
Personally I usually use Claude inside the Jetbrain's IDE terminal, even if I code by hand obviously less. I still like using the diff, navigation, quick access to any file path for my prompt etc but maybe that won't last.
(edit: although I currently use an old perpetual fallback license because I didn't like the last price increase especially as they slowly remove what I like in the UI)
You will be surprised by how many professional software engineers don't read their code or care these days.
I have seen a bubble sort function in a PR from an engineer with 10 years of experience. Meanwhile sort from standard library is easily available with one single line.
The bar has become as low as "it works" without considering what's in the code or whether the entire feature should even exist at all.
P.S. that same engineer sent out a PR of 200-file feature. The PR is so large that it freezes the latest MacBook Pro if you try to read it. Nobody reviewed it and he merged it himself. Nobody uses that feature, and nobody in the teams wants to maintain it. Now we are considering scrapping it.
The thing is: people quickly discover that even mediocre LLM-code with a mediocre LLM-review, is still better quality than what they hand wrote and hand-reviewed.
So it's already an improvement. Should it be manually read, comprehended, reviewed? Probably. But they can get to an improvement over what they did 2 years ago, with basically no effort. And then they can get a little bit further, with massive effort?
The "LLM-yolo" is a big knee in the cost/benefit curve. It's an improvement over their "old code". The only drawback is: it's still containing bugs, and now no one understands them. But that's not hitting them until that code has aged somewhat, so a year or two down the line.
> The thing is: people quickly discover that even mediocre LLM-code with a mediocre LLM-review, is still better quality than what they hand wrote and hand-reviewed.
If mediocre code is better quality than what you wrote by hand, you've quickly discovered that you're incompetent.
> If mediocre code is better quality than what you wrote by hand
Most code I have seen and reviewed over my 25+ year programmer life has been no worse than mediocre LLM code.
It's not a massive sample, but to me it suggests, most code programmers write, is somewhere between bad and mediocre.
And here's the appeal of the models: if what you used to produced was bad-to-mediocre, and you can now do slightly better for much cheaper, that's a huge win.
> And here's the appeal of the models: if what you used to produced was bad-to-mediocre, and you can now do slightly better for much cheaper, that's a huge win.
And the guy you were responding to is seeing people produce worse code with LLMs (e.g. senior engineers pushing non-library bubble sort implementations, like they're in a high school programming class).
And if you're somehow right, it's not a "huge win" for you. It's a sign you're personally providing little value to the business, and sooner or later you'll need to find a new career.
What I'm saying is the quiet part out loud: A majority of coders and a majority of really IS bad. And now a lot of that code is actually better (big win).
Basically: the code was so bad before, that un-reviewed LLM-code is now better than the average contribution. That means, that at least short term, the vibe coding can increase quality.
The problem is that it also increases code volume (bad) and rapidly decreases understanding (even worse).
Yeah I've been experimenting with a bunch of different domains: 2D CAD, PCB design, coding obviously and recently I had Claude finish a project on all three fronts: finish the firmware(in rust because why not), change up a few components and finalise the pcb design, source all the non pcb components and do all the documentation for the installer. To be fair, it had a solid base to build from, but still, almost everything was "good enough", now I'm at work looking at PCB design that take the electrical engineers 8 weeks when I know I could have had two prototypes shipped and tested already. The fact is 90% of people are not doing the really hard stuff and Claude can just brute force pretty much any low to mid tier white collar task given enough information.
Code volume and understanding can be tackled with a proper system prompt. Even afterwards, apart from costing resources, a cross-model optimization can increase quality of the output.
Unix philosophy in the system prompt could be useful if the code wants to be worked on later again.
> Unix philosophy in the system prompt could be useful if the code wants to be worked on later again
There is no system prompt that can prevent this. If all you needed was some kind of rather short instruction we'd already have that baked into harnesses a long time ago. The problem is not that agents do not have the right instructions, they theoretically have everything there is to know about software architecture already in their training data.
They do have "everything" but that's too much, I think. They need to have direct instruction that is in the context, that is appropriate for the project and codebase at hand. In the whole universe of training data, there's every approach imaginable. What's needed is enough guidance to identify the right approach consistently.
I recognize that crafting a 'perfect' prompt is impossible, but neither is writing the perfect code, or even the 'perfect' code style guide. But it is 100% the kind of problem that can be iteratively improved to a point where it's much better than what you get by one-shotting everything without much consideration of these details.
I myself am maybe 5% sophisticated if 0 is I just discovered LLMs today, and 100 is the most skilled at using AI the world has seen. What I've learned so far is that I have a lot of room to improve.
Which is why I am actually not completely worried about the careers of current software engineers: If you brought in a bunch of non-engineers to prompt Claude to build and maintain an ERP system, or a social networking site, or an ad exchange, or even Shopify clone, I don't see those products being competitive with ones where engineers armed with the same LLMs are building them.
> They need to have direct instruction that is in the context, that is appropriate for the project and codebase at hand
> I recognize that crafting a 'perfect' prompt is impossible, but neither is writing the perfect code, or even the 'perfect' code style guide
This is not about "perfect code" or style guides. For code styles we have linters, that does not require any instructions. I'm talking about software architecture for large complex web applications that dozens of people (that also change frequently) contribute to and that is spread across many different repos/services and an environment with constantly changing business requirements.
The terms that are relevant here are: coupling, cohesion, vertical slices, module boundaries and so on. This is software architecture and coding agents are terrible at this and there is no prompt and no instruction fixes this that could reasonably fit into a context window. I don't even think that coding agents fail because the lack the instructions and therefore adding instructions won't fix these failure modes.
> What I'm saying is the quiet part out loud: A majority of coders and a majority of really IS bad....
How would you know "the majority" from your anecdotes? Maybe you just spent your career working with incompetent people who didn't care.
And actually there's a point I forgot to address earlier, in my first comment:
>>>>> The thing is: people quickly discover that even mediocre LLM-code with a mediocre LLM-review, is still better quality than what they hand wrote and hand-reviewed.
People whose hand-written code is worse than "mediocre LLM-code with a mediocre LLM-review" are not going to discover the LLM-code is better, because they typically don't care. That's usually the whole problem with that kind of person.
> ...And now a lot of that code is actually better (big win).
> Basically: the code was so bad before, that un-reviewed LLM-code is now better than the average contribution. That means, that at least short term, the vibe coding can increase quality.
> The problem is that it also increases code volume (bad) and rapidly decreases understanding (even worse).
You're contradicting yourself here. Even accepting your statements uncritically, it doesn't sound like a "big win." It sounds like a marginal improvement that's ultimately self-defeating.
The problem with hand review I always had was trying to teach the other person. You don't want to present them with an avalanche of problems. So you pick the most important 5. Over time this iterates and you build someone good at what they do.
The good part of LLMs is you don't have to worry about overloading them: you can just outline every problem with the code they produce.
The bad part of LLMs is they don't really "get better" at this stuff. I'm not training a human, and there's a limited amount LLMs can learn. So the training phase never really ends - it's Eternal September.
There's also the problem of this ultimately being my code. It isn't Claude's - Claude isn't a person.
I still read the code. I use LLMs to review it. But I also review it myself. Ultimately its faster than before, and probably better quality (because I can just give all the problems to the LLM), but slower than people doing zero review.
> The bad part of LLMs is they don't really "get better" at this stuff. I'm not training a human, and there's a limited amount LLMs can learn. So the training phase never really ends - it's Eternal September.
After I give feedback to the AI I then ask it if we learned something and then I ask it to store that guidance in a relevant skill file.
I have skill files for everything and anything in my project. Three just for testing - one for frontend, backend, and e2e. I have one just for frontend forms. I have one for project terms, which I ask it to read before doing anything, so it keeps the terms in the project right. I have one for doing db migrations and one for doing backend routes. I have many tens of skills that have been slowly built up like this.
> The thing is: people quickly discover that even mediocre LLM-code with a mediocre LLM-review, is still better quality than what they hand wrote and hand-reviewed.
Emphasis mine.
I can't phantom some that bad at coding. Using such exaggeration void your comment.
> The thing is: people quickly discover that even mediocre LLM-code with a mediocre LLM-review, is still better quality than what they hand wrote and hand-reviewed.
No, I find that most teams I've been on have 5% to 20% of their most artisan engineers actually giving a shit about the code, and gently coaching the other 95% to 80% of the engineers who are usually much more junior during code review to not push unmaintainable slop. If you're on a team that doesn't still have someone giving a shit, it's not a sign that there are no teams that don't give a shit, it's that you're on a shit team.
There are also teams where the incentive is to get to pull request (or merge request) as soon as possible, so that you can move the ticket across the board and relieve downward pressure. That usually means pushing subpar code to PR that you know you'll spend another few hours fixing. EDIT: I bring this up because this can bias one's belief that humans produce poor quality code, when you're usually looking at the first draft that was incentivized to be pushed out "too early".
Anyway, if you're on a shit team, but you're still satisfying product and nothing is blowing up yet, there's a pretty good sign that your software has no moat and will be the first to be replaced by LLM-generated software on-demand. This is probably where most niche B2B back-office, front-office software sits. Stuff that sits somewhere in the realm of "We could probably do this in Excel if we wanted to."
> The thing is: people quickly discover that even mediocre LLM-code with a mediocre LLM-review, is still better quality than what they hand wrote and hand-reviewed.
Not my experience at all. Mediocre LLM-code, mediocrely reviewed is a loaded footgun aimed at both your feet.
It’s so easy to generate a pile of crap now that it “just works” as you say.
Quality, maintainability, simplicity, understandability, flexibility etc all still matter at $DAY_JOB, where you’ve got paying customers. We’ve got a responsibility to write good software that adds to people’s lives.
I’d recommend to try to raise the bar. Commit messages written by humans, no PRs above a certain size, any PR needs an introduction / explanation by author first for the reviewers.
This kind of thing is awful if this is how engineering is going for user-facing apps, but disastrous if this is how it's going for infrastructure and libraries.
Had AI do some work parsing markdown with the leading library for it.
Follow up work to generate markdown? It wrote a mess of manual string building instead of using said library lol. Even with strong AGENTS.md guidance around using existing and leading community libraries they will often take a hard left and write stdlib straight into your repo.
Y'all should scrap that feature and maybe the engineer. I believe the Shopify CEO recently referred to those types of PR as "slop grenades" that cause headaches for everyone else..
This is not overly surprising to me, the last decade or so has seen the industry become a "good job that pays well" and many people got into not for the love and craft, but for the money
I dont think it has as much to do with that as it does rising expectations from leadership to just ship MORE.
MORE MORE MORE like AI has given executives an excuse to ratchet up performance expectations by at least 3x (as in my company) up to 10x for certain start ups I've heard.
There's literally not enough time for a human to do all the activities around quality they were doing even a year ago.
It's interesting your complaints are similar to mine about TDD. I've dealt with so many engineers that assume that coverage and passing tests is the bar.
When you get paid to care, you will care. Unfortunately, no one cares, they just want results, any result. Bubble sort will do, especially for low volume tasks.
Use the time you save by not caring, to do other fun stuff.
> Use the time you save by not caring, to do other fun stuff
What kind of time do you save, especially at work? At any normal software shop you have an endless list of things to do. And most often you don't get to choose the "fun" part.
I used to use Claude inside of a terminal within Webstorm until I realized I rarely looked at the code in the IDE. Instead I was creating draft PRs and reviewing the code in github. Now I use claude inside of herdr, and I appreciate having more screen real estate devoted to claude. As a long-time Jetbrains subscriber it pains me to stop using it. But at this point, I'm not sure what they could come up with that would be compelling enough for me to switch back.
Their coding agent "Junie" is actually really good. The problem is they force you through only a few curated models. And try to funnel you through them to subscribe to do it, too. It's not like Pi or opencode that lets you just point at an OpenAI API endpoint and then choose whatever model. If I recall you can even actually use local models, or openrouter etc, but only use the specific model variants from their curated list. It's insane. They tried to stick themselves in the middle, and failed. Nobody will use it.
They've also done so many pivots on AI, all of them weakly and annoyingly done. They couldn't even pull of FiTM copilot well, they were super late on it and it had all sort of bugs.
They could have just taken the loss and written an amazing GUI coding agent that integrated well with their IDE -- amazing integrations with their refactorings, etc. -- but that played well in other people's ecosystems but they refused and tried to own the whole pipe. Or something. They just confused me.
Their latest attempt is to allow you to connect to and run other people's agent harnesses inside the IDE and it works well enough but it wasn't enough to grab me since I (like you) use herdr on another machine to do the coding.
I've been using their products since ~IDEA 3.x. Almost my entire 25+ year career really. My fingers are wedded to their keystrokes.
JetBrains face a unique problem: they are a real business that can't just raise infinity money from SoftBank or request government bailouts because the sheer size of their debts imperils the financial system. So they have to do things that might seem annoying or overly pushy versus their competitors.
For their entire existence people have complained about JetBrains this way because they always face some competitor that isn't making money and isn't even trying. Eventually those competitors go down, but a new one instantly arises. People just really love losing money on developer tools.
Wanting to charge money for an AI service is a clearly sensible business move. If their competitors weren't shredding the world's entire supply of investable capital as quickly as possible, this would be a good strategy. Alas.
You can actually configure the ide with any open ai compatible endpoint, I use llma and it lists all the models that I have currently installed, works well. Or am I missing your point?
Junie in particular, or just their various other "AI Assistant" / "Chat" things? They have multiple confusing overlapping products/modes going on. "JetBrains AI" -- which may or may not be same as "Junie"?, "AI Chat", then there's the "Agents" tab which integrates outside coding agents.
AI Assistant > Providers & API Key
There is an option Third Party AI Provider, where you can select OpenAI compatible, and then you can customize where (core, instant helper, inline etc) do you want to use third party, where JetBrains.
I guess they iterated quite a few products to "not get behind" and see what sticks.
Most recently they integrated air, which is basically an "agent management/orchestrator" where you can run any ACP-compatible agent with any model you want and it's just the single place where you manage them, see their progress, steer them, merge their results etc.
I think you're paid to deliver. Lots of developers for decades have delivered crap that looks good on the surface and is otherwise unmaintainable. Now we're reaching the point where "everyone can code" and review queues are getting too long, with the result of many PRs being yoloed.
This of course varies by company but this is clearly where it's headed: bot pushes, bot reviews, you look at the PR title and click merge.
I switched to vscode because the complexity and runtime overhead of intellij were no longer justified with Claude writing most of the code. I work on a big java code base and every two days I had to wrangle with intellij cache, clearing it or what not. With Claude I'm working in multiple work trees at the same time and this just amplifies every issue intellij had with slow indexing and broken caches. And TBH nowadays I eyeball the code more than read, so a basic code editor with navigation seems enough
I just look at my own diffs in a draft GHE PR and iterate with my agent on Github. This is often a much better UX than trying to make sure every single linter or thing is consistent between my machine and the CI machine. We do use Docker but it's still just easier to do it all on the CI box / Github.
The quickest sign I have right now to find if the developer/team don't read their code is looking at their recently AI-generated test cases. Often, coding agents go too verbose in their tests and they are most often overlooked even during normal reviews. If there are verbose tests, like declaring a constant and asserting it's value, you know that the code isn't being read much.
Using a CLI coding agent in your IDE's terminal is a terrible way to view conversation history and works poorly for organizing multiple conversations.
It only fits a hands-on, merely AI-assisted development approach, on one feature at a time, that is not typically productive compared to agentic development.
You might disagree, but you'll find that the proponents of the hands-on approach are losing ground every month as AI gets better at working autonomously.
Agentic development is basically a scam IMO. I’ve written about this before, but collaborative coding with AI is a huge productivity boost and you can still own all the quality. Ultimately with agentic development there’s too much you can’t, and won’t, review. The quality slips out of your hands.
I still read all the code AI produces, and I have a specific workflow. I scaffold the API first using AI, then review it for quality. Then I write tests, and review them for quality. Implementation is last, and technically I need not review the code but I choose to.
When I’ve done agentic development, the only thing I’ve accomplished is 100x more token burn with lower-quality code. It’s also not faster, because the tokens cost time and so many mistakes are made that must be cleaned up. The agents burn so much time going around in circles, when I could’ve just steered the model to write a good implementation.
Keep in mind, this is very fast. Models still produce thousands of lines of code in mere minutes. And with tests backing them up and an API frozen, the model goes much faster as it can iterate and has a framework for what it’s doing.
Except surrendering cognitive control over the system being built makes things worse.
Claude constantly makes poor architectural decisions, adds unnecessary and costly checks, makes wrong assumptions, etc.
Doesn't take the value out of LLMs writing code, but they need to be properly steered and reasoned with. How will you do so if you don't even browse the code it generates.
I always suspect that the people all in fully agentic codig like this are mostly creating prototypes, half-assed copies of existing products, etc.
This doesn't say much. Plenty mobile apps, even paid ones, are of shovelware quality. And even if that's not the case, it's typically something very self-contained and of relatively low complexity.
On my personal projects I also seldom need to review code very thoroughly. But it's also not super complex stuff.
At my workplace things are not like that. It's a very complex system on a highly regulated environment. Opus 5.5 constantly get things wrong in ways that are simply not acceptable.
And I am not even an AI naysayer. I accept it as another development tool.
JetBrains still has best tooling for previewing changes, resolving conflicts, git integration. I get that vibe coders not necessarily need all that but it's the best class tooling money can buy.
They should look into selling a standalone git conflict resolution app. Though for my money, nothing beats Fork if you're on a Mac: https://fork.dev (just wish it supported jujutsu)
Personally I don't use CLI anymore, Codex app is very good and it starts to look like how IDEs will be in the future. You can review code in a GitHub style diff and leave inline comments (super useful), have multiple agents work in parallel with or without worktrees, plus there is very good code navigation (especially if you ask followup clarification questions that will link to other parts of code).
I keep lazygit open next to each Claude/Codex session that's working on a change, but over time scrolling the changes has gone from necessary to just out of curiosity.
At this point of 2026, if you're reading code and still catching things, then the problem was before the code was written. You should have decided more high level preferences like invariants before the work began.
I was at a product developer conference a few weeks ago (will keep the company name private for now), and the speaker asked the room, How many of you are "still" using an IDE to create your applications, implying that if you are using an IDE, you are a dinosaur. I don't believe that but some company leaders are thinking it.
Related, it amazes me how many seasoned developers don't know how to do basic tasks in their editor/IDE with the keyboard and instead rely on their mouse. Most people don't need to be super users, but it baffles me when I see a developer who hasn't at least learned the keyboard shortcuts for opening files and jumping to functions/methods, etc.
I’m only a mild keyboard user in IDEs, but I think I’d go mad if the keyboard shortcuts for quick open, jump to line, jump to function, etc suddenly disappeared.
I’m sure there are people who aren’t looking at the code at all. But for those that are I guess I’m wondering why bother with an IDE anymore?
I’m finding I can just review everything I need to with a text editor like Neovim now. Even GitHub review is probably good enough for people.
I am mostly happy with Neovim with an LSP integration. I'm not going to say it's "lighter" or anything because rust-analyzer isn't exactly "small", but it is a simpler, and IMO "cleaner" interface. Also completely free.
I do look at the code and have to correct Claude most of the time, but I've noticed that with AI-assisted coding, I mostly look at the diffs when i'm inside IntelliJ. I don't need a pricey full-fledged IDE to just look at files and their diffs.
I'm slowly accepting that this is the new reality.
I've spent 1 month between august and early september writing some of the best code of my life. LLMs only provided feedback, I wrote all the code manually, still remember it by heart.
I was very delighted by the many architectural iterations that led to it. 9 files, around 10k lines of code (of those, 7k tests).
By the end of super funny exercise I kinda realized that if I had the same feature vibe coded it would've been better. I would've done much more and progressed more feature wise.
I just feel stupid hand writing my code.
It doesn't help that I work with stellar individual contributors. All of my team mates (except a junior) are either all former faang or contributed to projects we all use (from the TypeScript compiler to Linux). And they are all abandoning if not spearheading the abandonment of reading code. I'm talking people that truly loved the technical aspect of it and excelled in it.
I just feel stupid, like I'm carrying a weight that I should abandon.
Comments like yours feel would've made sense 6 months ago, but now are crumbling.
Software is essentially so cheap and throwaway nowadays that letting LLMs write it is imperative. When you find your use cases you start reviewing it or rewriting it thoroughly.
I’ve been using agents to do the code for me, but I explicitly tells it to iterate in small changes that I can review and approve as it happens, not after a 2k lines diff. It makes me understand what’s being made, and test every little change before we move on to change other parts of the code. Also helps you correct any misunderstanding right from the start.
When you give a ticket to a jr developer, do you look over their shoulder the entire time they write the code? Or do pause to answer questions, give feedback on how to go about a task, and review their results?
> I'm amazed by people that don't open an IDE or look at code
Oh, boy, here we go... Sighs and pulls up a chair.
Using an IDE has nothing to do with looking at code. The best engineers I've ever known use what JetBrains aficionados would refer to as "editors", not full-blown IDEs. To a person, not one of them felt as though they were missing anything they wanted or needed. I would probably even say "Unix is my IDE". I have a terminal chock-full of advanced command line tools to search and manipulate codebases. It's always fun and convenient when a GUI gives easy access to those things, but it's just that: a convenience, and only when the GUI exposes the full option set of the underlying tool, which they almost never do. Basically, I can alt-tab to a terminal, press up-arrow to expose "cargo build", and hit enter to run it, about as easily as someone else can select the build menu in an IDE. Further, if that build menu option is any less configurable than Cargo.toml, I'd prefer the text config any day. And finally, "cargo build" works with any editor I'm using that day, even if they don't their own build system wrappers.
IDEs are fine for people who enjoy them. I grind my teeth whenever anyone hints that they're remotely necessary for, well, anything, or that people who aren't using them are somehow missing out on something. We know what we're missing, and frankly, we're not missing it.
> Are you paid to press enter at anything that Claude present to you?
I mean, sometimes work falls exactly at the tool's strongest suit/match.
I am trying to think of what a comparison here could be but, for example, I remember early days in my career where pretty much 80% of the work was writing boilerplate and using scaffolding/generator tools, plugging them in the various plumbing and pipes of the stack, and just ticking boxes through Jira
Lots of "CRUD" and/or similar "recipe" type of work that was really just turning your brain off and needed that grunt labour force
You may ask: why is the person even needed?
My answer is the same as before: I don't know, I didn't know why were they needed back them either, felt like all could be automated as well, maybe the cost to invest in automating and mapping that all out was never a priority and the ROI math was "good enough" for the business while leadership had other north stars they were worried about?
Actually I really only need bare vim now. It's really refreshing. I can view, navigate, diff etc without any fancy plugins. I can add comments where I want the agent to change something.
I've found that reviewing generated code, leaving comments, and asking Claude to address my comments is usually enough. When it isn't, a common editor is usually sufficient, and an IDE takes too long to start for the very small change I want to make.
If you need to review every edit that claude wants to make what's the point in using it? We're now treating it basically like a junior dev. Do our best to make sure that it's on the right path (leaning hard on the superpowers plugin) then let it work and look at the result. Though even that review is heavily AI assisted now. Our leadership has mandated that everything that can be done by AI, should be done by AI. We've only been in that mode for a couple of months but I'm starting to think that it's plausible with proper human steering and oversight.
I'm not being flippant. If I need to sit and watch a claude session reviewing every edit it makes, that's slower than me coding the changes by hand. Either it's good enough to work independently or it's not worth using. I have no idea how Google is using AI, but from what I've seen at my own company I do know that using AI effectively _and_ setting up repos/projects for good AI usage (and with guardrails to keep AI in check) are both acquired skills. Skills that the majority of devs don't have right now.
Really the single biggest piece I use today is using a tool like superpowers to ensure your task is well defined. Added bonuses are its TDD implementation skills and multiple review steps baked into the workflow. Before I discovered superpowers I was manually telling claude to do these workflows, the plugin makes it easy.
In the repo itself:
* Keep agents.md focused; claude likes to really bloat it by default. The "Adding guidance for AI agents" rules go into every project and have worked pretty well.
* Aggressively use nested agents.md files. Focused rules located where they're relevant seem to do much better than having a large whole-project rule dump in the root agents.md.
* Recently I've started using the tech debt and deferred work documentation rules. Claude frequently decides on its own that some piece of functionality or issue is "deferred until later" or "out of scope". These rules help make it clear so that you can make it fix the item or at least have it documented for a followup session.
* Have it test all the things. Most of my personal projects with claude have about a 3:1 ratio of test:application code and high coverage. Claude make it easy to build test harnesses for things that most of us wouldn't have bothered with 5 years ago.
* Strict type checking, linting, static analysis, warnings as errors, etc. Anything you can turn on or add to block questionable code, do it.
* Use a claude pre-tool hook to run all of your checks before you allow a git commit command. Left on its own it can and will decide that it has a valid reason to bypass git commit hooks (husky) to commit broken code or tests.
I'm paid to produce software that has features and works.
Nobody cares how I get there or how ugly the code is. They care how fast I can do it and how reliable the software is.
I look at code sometimes, in down time, to see what's been done terribly by AI, and to fix it and hopefully fix the process so that things don't get done terribly in that particular way in the future.
It's not about "how ugly the code is". Poor solutions heaped on top of poor solutions can result in a system with real users and intractable issues. I'm all for AI, but not reviewing the code seems likely to cause issues long term.
Well, I used to pay more attention to the code, and then I found that if I spent more tokens having the AI review its work than actually creating new features, I was able to get more, better work done.
The AI review stage is where I've found prompting matters a lot more than that initial prototyping phase. I've iterated on prompts and tooling that help the AI keep the codebase clean-ish.
> Well, I used to pay more attention to the code, and then I found that if I spent more tokens having the AI review its work than actually creating new features, I was able to get more, better work done.
Of course it did. Because reviewing code thoroughly is harder than writing it.
Writing only consists of "making sure it does the task", reviewer have to understand code first, check if it does the task, then check whether it doesn't affect something else negatively (and it can be meta things like "doesn't adhere to project style", even if technical side is correct)
> Of course it did. Because reviewing code thoroughly is harder than writing it.
If there's one thing that I learned from AI proponents is that they don't value correctness. They only want to write more code every day. Which actually baffles me, because for a given feature set, there should be a Definition of Done, and the only work left should be slight alterations for oversight and dependency updates.
Reviews take way more time than new features, and often utilize 3 subagents at a time - it's not uncommon to have reviews take 3 hours when the feature only took 15 minutes. The numbers here are just estimates, though - I don't keep track. "10x to 20x tokens on review" is probably underestimating review cost, if anything.
I don't review all code myself, but I do spend down-time reading code. When I find obviously bad code/patterns/whatever, I don't just fix it directly - I work to create automated tests (like static analysis, almost) or adjust or create prompts and tools for agents (either for review stage or initial implementation) to solve that class of issue, instead of just that instance of it.
I never review the first iteration. I review it after the agents have already poured a ton of time into it, if ever.
I do sometimes watch agents work, and redirect them if I see them doing something dumb. But, usually, I have 5+ agents running, not counting sub-agents, and I'm just messing with the apps myself to find the next feature to create or polish.
Whats your YOE, like when did you enter tech as a SWE?
This shouldn't be normalized for you yet unless you're at a faang pushing this at the edge and new to the field, cause this isn't what we used to do 2 years ago.
If you're happy with the ai slop $$$ job more power to you but that isn't the entire field and there used to be (and hopefully still are) good and fun engineering jobs.
Contrary to popular normie belief, no not everyone wants to work at the Metas and OpenAIs and for good reason.
edit: Guys a literal business owner writing code for his own business, christ, what a waste of my time. So instead of hiring actual engineers you try to make it sound like you're employed as a software engineer and your experience is remotely normal. You are the literal business owner not filling seats because you're using AI.
"I'm paid to just shut up and code, baby!"
Yeah, that isn't a real SWE job, bud, don't make comments like you're in the trenches.
YOE is ~30, from my first PHP app to present. I've spent somewhere between 5 and 80 hours a week coding for the past 30 years, mostly self-employed, writing tools and creating custom CNC machines/robots for my own business, but more recently doing same thing for a company as a full time employee.
I still get to do some coding, where there are safety-critical production systems, but the work is mostly tooling that gets us to that point or supports the business otherwise.
It's an awesome job. Couldn't be funner, pretty much, except on data collection days. I get high level tasks, or come up with my own, and find or build solutions - no more running a whole business, doing production, keeping books, shipping orders, doing customer support - I only do the stuff I like.
Why's that? Ruby on Rails is a fantastic framework. My point was that if somebody who has done the work before AI agents is now following the footsteps of not reading code, then why are we still telling people that it's still useful to read code?
Wow, this really sucks. With all the money flocking to companies that trained LLMs on stolen data, we may lose the only set of IDEs that offer high quality professional development tools
I'm surprised that the word "only" still applies. I have my laments about JB (PyCharm / RR): Mainly centered around performance. Yet it has no competition! Whenever I read about VsCode, or Zed as alternatives, I feel disbelief, as they're not in the same league.
Zed in particular, from the way it was described upon release, sounded like it should have been a JB competitor. Reality: It can't even move functions or structs!
I love JetBrains. For many years I was a happy subscriber to the All Products Pack, paid for out of my own pocket. I would have said that you'd have to pry my JetBrains from my cold, dead hands.
A year or two ago, I finally gave up:
1. The IDE was simply too slow - notably slower and "heavier" than VS Code in particular - and it seemed to regularly get slower.
2. Bugs - from the complex (TypeScript constructs that tsc itself handles just fine while WebStorm's code analysis kept throwing false positives on) to the trivial and silly (failing to properly handle the <col> tag in React), and often staying open for years.
Meanwhile, VS Code just kept getting better, addressing the complaints I had with it while staying fast.
I work almost exclusively in TypeScript these days; as other commenters pointed out, I'm sure that JetBrains products are still great for other languages.
And their refactoring tools remain second to none. I'm profoundly disappointed in our industry that the VS Code developers apparently looked at JetBrains, with its arsenal of expertly crafted, deterministic, testable refactorings, and said, "Nope, we'd rather make everyone use inherently random language models for anything more complex than Rename Symbol."
They have made a fair bit of improvements, as performance was a big complaint. It's still not perfect, but VSCode also isn't nearly as powerful in my experience and needs a million plugins to match basic features.
Reading Jetbrains' EULA makes me think it would be an easier read if they just listed the entities they would NOT share your data with.
vscodium[0] might require some aftermarket bells and whistles to reach feature parity with jetbrains' "swiss army kitchen sink" approach but at least vscodium is not data-mining me.
IMO it's an overengineered sloppy mess. It adds too many bells and whistles without taking away anything. Nul checking is about the only serious feature it has. The rest is chrome and bling. It's "ricer" Java.
It's not even close. vscode can approximate JB IDEs but that takes pulling in plugins on your own, managing their configuration, and adapting when the setup inevitably breaks. JB IDEs bake in everything you can get via vscode plugins with documentation, a cohesive experience, and regular maintenance to keep them working for you. Concrete examples that are better in JB land for me: git conflict resolution, refactoring (in numerous ways), jumping to definitions, finding usages (especially on Python projects).
That's always been my experience. Not even close. One gives you legos that lets you make a plastic toy, and the other is an industrial machine shop for code.
I thought maybe I was holding VSCode wrong, though.
> I thought maybe I was holding VSCode wrong, though.
Likewise (Same with zed). I've given them a thorough try several times, assuming I was holding it wrong as you say based on conversations with others who use them effectively. I've reached the conclusion you say here each time.
Code intelligence (find usages, go to definition, refactor/rename/move, etc.) and debugging are on another level - more powerful, more reliable, with more edge-cases covered.
At least, that was so in dynamic languages, like Python, and PHP, last I checked.
For dotnet, Rider runs rings around VSCode. Even using the Resharper plugin, VSCode is nowhere near the same functionality. I even use Rider above Visual Studio because it works way better for mobile and cross platform. VSCode runs okay on the same hardware as Rider, but it is all too manual to configure. VS2026 is a horrible bloated pig that constantly grinds to a halt on the same hardware.
When have you tried VS last? Since they went multi core, it’s usually very fast and it’s mostly R# slowing it down (though I read that improved, dunno).
VS2026, "August 2026 feature update" is installed apparently. Even without Resharper, it is not as fast as Rider, and Rider build speeds up MAUI build and deploy by at least 50%
Just feels like they've been making all the wrong decisions. Quality has been really lackluster, and their attempts to hop onto the AI train have been as annoying as they have been bad. CoPilot sucked. Their own AI coding models suck.
The redesign they've gone for also seems like a supremely weird choice. It's like they're trying to be more like VS Code, when their probably biggest selling point was that unlike VS Code, they offered a full and traditional IDE experience.
Their trajectory has been a deeply questionable mix of change for the sake of change and nervously doing what everyone else is doing.
There are even areas in which some of those best IntelliJ IDEs.
One such thing that Xcode has that IntelliJ doesn’t is per-pane history. In Xcode hitting back/forward navigates history for your focused editor pane whereas IntelliJ’s navigates history across all editor panes.
This might sound like a minor difference, but Xcode’s way gets me to where I want to go more quickly most of the time because I’m not having to wade through the likely-irrelevant history of the other panes. It’s a frequent frustration whenever I have to use an IntelliJ IDE.
I tend to split panes by functional role, so for example in one pane I might be jumping through view code while in the other I might be working with view models. It’s not helpful to bounce me up and down the editing history of the view model file to the right when the intention is to quickly jump though view file history on the left (or vice versa).
The best thing to do would be to make it a checkbox, like IntelliJ does for almost everything else, but not that for some reason.
Another example, it took several years for JetBrains to add mixed language JNI debugging in IntelliJ, between Java and C, C++. Something that Eclipse and Netbeans were already doing in 2005.
Mostly constrained to a single ecosystem and dev/deployment platform - a platform that has never been particularly great for development and has been made vastly less so in the recent years.
Happy to hate on MS as much as the next guy but VSCode is pretty much the Chrome of the IDE world at this point, that might be what parent was alluding to (since I'd struggle to defend any other Microsoft software).
It's got an editor, a debugger, code intelligence, a debugger, terminal, task running, test explorer, refactoring tools, project management, and so on. What's an IDE if not a text editor with bells and whistles?
It's almost as if a company can have good and bad products...
Microsoft has had a very long reputation (for good reason) for having good developer tooling, even if Windows was not particularly developer friendly...
I still haven’t found an IDE that I feel really helps me develop with AI better than the command line. I have built bespoke tools that work the way I want. But a really good integrated solution would blow my current workflow out of the water. No one seems to have built an IDE with deep support for worktrees, parallel session, walking me thru diffs, and optionally handing control back to me to write the occasional hand-written code myself. Plus most of my work is done on mobile, so Jetbrains has an amazing opportunity…but they seem to be chasing the competition instead of focusing on their moat.
Right now there's a huge friction with IDEs, that if I have it open while claude is working on something, then any caches it has get stale very quickly, and it churns processing trying to keep up with edits.
Any leverage that claude could benefit from LSPs or language/AST MCPs is undone by that tooling not being able to keep up or stay fresh, so the IDE just "runs hot" for no purpose.
Which means I'm incentivised to close my IDE while claude is working, and now I've got used to not looking at the code.
Like you, I really want a system that works better. I want claude to search and edit through better tooling, it would be faster, more accurate, and should in theory be able to leverage compilers to apply edits better and more accurately.
I don't want claude wasting an awful lot of time grepping for things that a compiler cache can answer, but if that compiler cache can't keep up then it's actively harmful.
I'm sure there must be a better way, there must be a way to have smarter more change-aware cache invalidation, and smarter more cache-aware claude tool use, but so far none has happened.
Long term I'm sure the pairing will emerge, but unfortunately I don't think that's going to come from the IDE vendor side, it'll have to come out of some harness research lab, where Anthropic or a competitor finds a way to reliably leverage this stuff for a speed and accuracy boost.
It's completely bonkers to me that an LLM can almost "natively" read profiler output, but doing so involves vast amounts of text and context ingestion, when there are real tools sitting there that it ignores in preference for either reading vast amounts or iffy python one-shot scripts to parse stuff.
This 100%. My current workflow is switching between CC and VS Code to review code, and it's extremely clunky. There is still not a single harness/ADE that can do everything correctly in one tool.
Yeah, one limit for me is I need to use the subscriptions, so I'm tied to the Claude Code and Codex harnesses. The best solution IMO is a "bring-your-own-harness" one, where you can drop in whatever harness works the best for you and your development environment can be driven by it.
Air itself as well as the new Air plugin for the IDEs and the AI assistant support ChatGPT subscriptions, though you may have to disable JetBrains as a provider so that it's not billed against that. (It's weirdly called logging ot of JetBrains, though you still remain logged in to JetBrains for all other purposes.)
Anthropic is a different story, but I think it may still be possible via the Claude ACP agent (JetBrains' support of ACP is generally pretty good; I use it with anothe harness for open weight models regularly).
Maybe something like delta? This is still pretty new from the folks that make Zed, but looks promising and would address some of the things you mention https://delta.dev/
> I still haven’t found an IDE that I feel really helps me develop with AI better than the command line.
With Codex GUI app and Astra you can communicate through screenshosts and collages. WAY faster and more precise for many types of jobs and workflows. Literally just scribble crap into the screens and it knows... no need to write out 50 paragraphs of prose to describe a button and its position.
I will have to try it out. I haven't tried it yet mostly because it seemed like it costed extra or would put me on API pricing. I have tried a workflow with Android Studio with Claude Code, but whenever I opened a worktree it took 5 minutes for Gradle to sync.
Sublime was/is still the best, unfortunately had to finally abandon it due to lack of first-class agent support. Hard to find something that emphasizes core text editing first and that doesn't constantly have some new update to apply on start that may break or change something.
It feels like JB is trying that, but it hasn't materialized in a way I understand yet; they have a handful of AI tools, and I don't fully understand them at this point, nor how they integrate and what roles they fill. (June, Air, AI asssistant, AI autocomplete)
Orca is too maximalist IMO, and it isn't a lot of work to switch together something with Herdr and a few vibed up plugins to get much (if not all) of the benefits that matter to you without the complexity and weight.
I agree Orca is packed with functionality but I don’t know what “weight” or “complexity” is. It’s just an app on my machine, not some software I’m maintaining. It can be the most complex system for all I care behind the scenes, as long as it runs fast and satisfies my needs I’m pleased - which so far it has been and more. I want to spend as little time thinking about my dev environment and the most amount of time thinking about what I’m developing.
To each their own though, I’ve heard great things about Herdr setups.
Cursor has support for work trees, parallel chats, will walk you through diffs line by line. This is what I primarily use for the walking through diffs feature. If I need something to just throw over the wall, I fire up claude.
When you are paid to sit on your ass to review as much generated code as you can, or to create as much good code as possible given the constraints of a limited amount of tokens, sure. But when you're on your own clock, the trade-off between latency, token budget and quality shifts considerably. And when it actually is a side project (yeah, many meanings of "serious" will be out, I give you that), mobile is just awesome.
That slow trickle of back and forth that gets our intelligent machines called "toasters" in a way not predicted by Battlestar Galactica at all, that really starts shining on mobile. Hands off on terms of signing off every little detail, hands on in terms of never being too far out of the loop, keeping the unattended steps small.
I'm not sure what the problem is after rereading their post? All you need to support everything they said is a remote connection to a heirarchy of worktree-supporting sessions per project, with each having a proper scrolling feed of agent actions taken and your input box.
It's purely management fault, it happened around 2022-2023. They had all the chances to become a great agentic IDE/harness at some point, if they would start in time, support plugin developers, allocate a proper team instead of 2 people and some semi-random internships. A lot of users were questioning this publicly and privately with them, we all knew how it will end this way. JetBrains lost, no one wants their Junie in 2026 (and didn't want in 2024-2025, whatever was the name of the integration at that time, it was awful). I was on Ultimate Plan since 2012, appx. I quit entirely in 2024. They asked to answer a few surveys over the last few years - even the questions there were far from reality. RIP, JetBrains, it's mostly unrecoverable at this point.
Their management decisions are strange, right. They had a nice tool called Upsource, we used it for code reviews. Then they sunset it and told us to use JetBrains Space instead. After we migrated to JetBrains Space, they said, oh wait, we sunset it too. So we had to migrate to GitLab. And now, with AI-assisted coding, I don't even need their IDE anymore, because I mostly look at diffs. And that kinda brings us back to Upsource. That thing could have been grown to support AI-assisted development, like, get rid of all the heavy IDE stuff, and just have a place for code reviewing agents' output and merging things. Somewhat like GitLab Lite but fully agentic-oriented. I think it would have covered 99% of our use cases.
I heard rumors JetBrains started going downhill around 2022-2023 because they severed ties with employees in Russia's St. Petersburg, which housed their R&D and all (although many employees were relocated but who knows).
I had a chat with some of their product team. Both Upsource and Space failed to get enough market traction to justify the continuous investment. Same with Code With Me.
On Space case, I think they felt it became too complex to maintain internally while other great alternatives were very hard to compete against.
They were sad about it, as they really worked hard on these products, but it's also easy to understand why they make the decision. Despite the tools being nice, if nobody buy them, it's just a loss.
I didn't use it because it wasn't open source and didn't want to invest time and get lock in to a solution that might be shutdown (which is what happened). If they would have made it open source there would have been more people and companies going to take the risk. Not making Spaces open source was a bad decision.
CC + my own custom tools, I don't see any reason to pay for devtools in 2026 (same as trying to monetize them, or even just share/distribute). My first custom solution was built on top of JB's core in early 2024, btw, but not any more. JetBrains "suite" doesn't really lock you in, it's more like "aura" of the product itself that made me attached for almost 13 years (I never was able to switch, I still think VS Code is so ugly and counter-intuitive in comparison with JB).
That's totally fine, I'm pretty sure people continue to use JB by inertia, requirements, personal preferences, lack of alternatives, inability to introduce some, or whatever is the reason behind. It's all for good. Most (I'd even say all) people I know jumped off paid JB products within the last two years (C#, Rust, Python, Web stacks), even being evangelists previously (I was religiously protecting and advertising JB in all possible holywars). And in 2023 we already were betting if there's a place for JB "as-is" in the current/future landscape. Too slow, too enterprisish.
Hopefully this is a wake-up call for them to drop the AI hype-chasing and refocus on making the best IDEs for us dinosaurs who, for whatever crazy reason, still code by hand and appreciate solid (deterministic) tools to help us out.
On a very related note, I'm probably very late to this discussion, but has anyone else noticed autocomplete in JetBrains products has gotten significantly worse after the advent of LLMs? It would previously take into account type signatures and all kinds of context, now it's clearly just a very minimal next token generator, often producing code that doesn't even compile.
This tracks with what I've observed, as a fan-and-sometimes-user. They look to be funding a skunk works - which started with their version of Cursor (Jules or something), which wasn't great.
They are working on a cli agent; I tried it, but it silently injected hooks into all my other cli agents to re-target JB inference APIs, which caused me to burn through my JB tokens in like two minutes and b0rked all my running agent sessions.
They are working on a spec-driven thing, which I attempted to try but getting burned by the cli thing I abandoned it. It looks really interesting - it's a meta-harness, built and shipped with one of the Spec-Something frameworks, where you define your own specs for your projects, kinda like snake-eating-it-own-tail-of-specs. If spec-driven is The Future, they are at least trying.
There have been a few other things I can't recall, but my observation is that they are taking generative AI seriously as an existential threat, and probably (as another poster here put it) "heating the office burning tokens".
So a stable company like JetBrains, which sells developer tools and has extensive experience in compilers, ended up with a net financial loss. Meanwhile, Cursor—a startup only a few years old, founded by students, built on a VS Code fork, and primarily powered by OpenAI's API—was valued at $60 billion.
This financial loss is a report at a point in time about that point in time. A company's valuation is also reported at a point in time but it represents an aggregation of how much profit the company might generate across time (please forgive the layman's understanding). They are apples and oranges.
- all sorts of applications for building software, from IDEs to task trackers
- a huge, loyal user base
- being big enough to have deals with leading AI providers
They had the potential to lead the AI devtools race. Right now, good but quite basic tools like Pi, Conductor, or Herdr are getting good funding.
But JetBrains just failed to adapt. Their biggest AI attempt – Air – was way worse than Conductor, which is built by a team of few people.
I feel like there are just a few shortsighted people in leadership behind this flop. I will not be surprised if JetBrains will be defunct/shrinked in 5 years.
They still can make a comeback. They don’t have to re-invent the wheel but build a cohesive and tightly integrated experience with Claude Code/Codex or bring your own harness. When it comes to code navigation Jetbrains IDEs are still the best. They would have to improve the code review tooling though because that’s more important nowadays than code writing tools
I don't think this is related to AI. Pre-AI I thought for many years that they have spread themselves too wide and thin. A new IDE pretty much every six months. Unsustainable whilst ignoring their existing customers and products. I think it's inevitable that they've ended up here.
I think they've started to realise that and are trying to reign it in with 'Fleet' and 'Code With Me' deprecations.
As a very heavy user of IDEA, DataGrip and PyCharm, I still appreciate the level of power and flexibility JetBrains offer but continue to be dismayed by the absolutely massive binaries of their IDEs and really bad performance, especially their file watching capabilities which take ages to sync the changes done by external tools into the IDE.
Say what you may, VSCode feels lightweight in comparison despite a lot of plugins (I’m not a VSCode user but I do endure it at work).
Shedding IDE size, decoupling bundled plugins from shipped binaries, and improving file system sync would be great improvements they could do, besides pursuing AI and whatnot.
That’s interesting, as we have just completed a huge migration of our CI/CD infrastructure off Teamcity, for plenty of reasons but “we’re paying a shit ton of money for this and it’s a pain in the ass” was a major one.
They seem to be very bloated and unable to modernize their product lines.
I've been thinking about doing the same, what did you migrate to? I was thinking GitHub actions but the outage yesterday reinforced that it might be a bad idea.
We migrated to buildkite, as it allowed self hosted agents and lots of “building blocks” to extend stuff ourselves.
One of the things we really use heavily is dynamic pipelines, as we have a lot of different stuff.
In teamcity, we had close to 1k build configs, and were able to replace this with about 20 dynamic pipelines in buildkite.
We did need to do a bunch of plumbing, but in this age of AI it means our developers don’t have to rely on devops anymore to get their stuff done to make all this work.
One of the problems was that our devs were “afraid” to alter teamcity build configs, as it all was more fragile than it should be and they were afraid to break stuff.
Teamcity allows for customization with plugins, but all that is so bloated with either Java or Kotlin and requires a shitton of domain specific knowledge to pull off.
Buildkite is much simpler with YAML and their plugin infrastructure which is effectively just hooks into scripts. It’s well designed.
I agree, build kite really blew me away. I know everyone tried to make simple yet powerful abstractions but it usually fails; build kite was the opposite where it was surprisingly better than I expected
Long time JB user here, and I mean long time. The past year I have been using claude in the JB terminal but nothing, and I mean nothing new has come of it in that year. Stuck in a tiny terminal window, opening files every so often. A couple months ago I switched back to iTerm2, full screen and use sublime to open the odd file every so often. So this makes 100% sense. They need to do a better job integrating with agents and not pushing their own.
> Long time JB user here, and I mean long time. The past year I have been using claude in the JB terminal but nothing, and I mean nothing new has come of it in that year.
I don't get these comments. JetBrains AI assistant supports ClaudeCode, Codex and any ACP harness including OpenCode, in addition to their own. What is it with people saying they're stuck in the JB terminal etc. if they want Claude?
I cancelled my JetBrains subscription a year ago when they announced price increases.
The quality of their software has been falling despite all recurring revenue. I used JetBrains for almost a decade because it just worked. JetBrains Toolbox is some of the worst software I've used, it causes more problems that it solves for me.
Needing to install a different IDE per language is also something I dislike about JetBrains, but not a deal breaker.
VS Code has had a working remote SSH plugin for almost a decade now. Jetbrains took years to implement anything more than file sync, then when they finally added Gateway it could never even copy it's own settings.
These days, I spend more time on Gitlab reviewing code than in my IDE, and it's been the case for a couple of months already.
In my opinion sunsetting JetBrains Space was a major strategic mistake. It would have given them the moat they currently crave for to compete in the AI space, by enabling cool AI powered features (codex like sandboxes connected to their ides etc...).
All their AI products currently feel like desparate shots in the dark, while Jetbrains Space would have been a natural home, delivering strong value and differentiation.
Once Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode matured and discredited Junie, the next thing i looked for was a code review and CI/CD environment that was as seamlessly integrated to my IDE as possible. I was baffled to discover that JetBrains had just that but decided to sunset it in the midst of the AI war. Absolutely baffling....
IMO there’s a ton of room for innovation in the IDE space.
It looks like software dev is going the way of natural language as the final spec that humans see. Regardless of whether this is a good idea or not, it’s happening. My boss asked us not to write any code manually starting in Jan, and now has hinted that we should stop reviewing code too.
Natural language as spec obviously has a ton of limitations. And here an opinionated IDE that can define this sort of workflow better is primed to gain a lot of market share, devs clearly aren’t fussed about switching between IDEs right now.
I should be able to, for example, click on a plantuml diagram and see what the endpoint definitions are,
See where the request schemas are.
If I have Agents.md files scattered across my codebase I would like my IDE to help me manage them
After decades of being happy for my JetBrain, I cancelled my all productssubscription this week. I find that the quality of the tool has gone down the drain. I replaced Datagrip with TablePlus and I don't really need Pycharm, IDEA that much anymore. Recently, I kept complaining about it not working properly. To give one example, the connections over SSH suck and regularly force me to restart the app.
I makes me sad. Jetbains used to be a company I looked up to because it always positively surprised me. Now I keep complaining.
I still love my IDEA & Rider, but a lot of my attention has moved to VSCode with Claude Code plugin. The Claude plugin/tooling for these IDE's is abysmal in comparison (talking strictly about the Claude Code experience here - not the bundlende AI Assistant.
I am not moving away from JetBrains anytime soon, but it does gets harder to justify when I spend considerable time in a competing offering that has better experience and is free...
This probably is not a reflection of their products but, boy do I wish it was!
As a long time C++ developer on Linux Clion was the best there was and it seems that they've completely neglected the core product. The core features are in a free fall while they keep adding new smart AI crap and shuffling the UI around and adding new show stopper bugs.
Hopefully they're investing in better llm integration. I really want to automatically use the jetbrains diff for every llm code change locally.
I also want to have the jetbrains code quality scans automatically ran and fixed, and maybe something that enforces permissions and a sandbox. Basically I want the IDE to be more of a control interface.
Between VSCode and AI, all the engineers I work with have stopped using JetBrains products.
I don't think the problem is AI itself; they can have AI too, AI as capable as something like Cursor, for example. The issue is that their product is bloated and slow, and much of the technological leadership they once had has been overtaken by VSCode.
Jetbrains IDEs are far from bloated and slow especially compared to electron and chromium based software. Besides - they are still growing in revenue so the financial loss probably isn't due to users jumping ship.
For Android development I still prefer Android Studio (IntelliJ based). Maybe just a habit because I don't really write code there anymore. For everything else usually VS Code.
JetBrains product for me got worse over time. PyCharm performance issues were so bad I stopped using the IDE and switched. So I no longer pay for the premimum features. Ontop of it all their remote features do not work well and is super laggy.
One sad thing is they gave up on Fleet and never unified all their IDEs. Reality is many people work in many languages and need to have good support for multiple langauges. The plugin model for other langauges in a primary langauge sorta works but it's not great compared to VSCode which can support many many languages.
You'll be surprised (or not) to find out a lot of people aren't using anything. Claude gets asked to build it, then some other clown uses their copy of Claude to do the PR review and then it gets merged.
Their revenue is increasing, but their profits have been on a decline despite increased revenue. The table on that page only goes back to 2021, but the trend of increasing revenue and decreasing profits has been going on at least that long. I don’t think ai would have been a factor that far back. Even though github copilot did launch sometime around then, I doubt it was much of a factor.
Like or not, LLM are getting better at debugging than humans... Not sure for how long will companies will keep paying for IDEs (which, tbf, are peanuts compared to the LLM cost).
I have no idea what that contains, but it appears to be a rather large dip, compared to previous years. Overall it's not really that interesting without context and commentary from JetBrains.
I find IntelliJ IDEA a great tool, even for my fully vibecoded apps. I edit the READMEs in it, look at the version history, use it for debugging, for builds, and so on.
My guess is that people aren't abandoning their IDEs. Their market is probably growing. I suspect they're burning money on subsidized inference, just like everybody else.
I canceled my DotNet Ultimate subscription (or whatever it's called) earlier this year, even though Rider is (was) one of the best IDEs for my main squeeze, F#. It's not because I don't use Rider or IDEs, but because I've felt the quality has gone downhill ever since I first started paying for it. What broke the camel's back was the constant surveys they were sending me surveys asking how much I love AI in Rider, and how much I wanted to see more AI in their IDEs, when all I wanted was an IDE that didn't have some shitty new F# language bug every time I updated it.
Ironically, I finally got around to using AI to configure my Neovim setup with a decent F# and C# experience. I don't have it set up with a debugger yet, but at least I'm not paying hundreds of dollars every year for a company to neglect the thing I paid for.
Jetbrains lost our entire (small) team a few years back when they completely neglected (no, to minimal progress for years) their typehint support in PyCharm. I think they now finally have caught up somewhat judging from the updated on all the issues in youtrack I'm still subscribed to.
They keep trying to bite into AI but they should focus on making their tools more stable and should have invested more into Kotlin Native, could of had a fully native IDE and tooling by now and purged reliance on the JVM.
Cause Cursor was so massive? JetBrains is not just some random niche company, they're used in 88 companies out of the Fortune 100, that's nothing to sneeze at.
As far as what they are spending, it is extremely confusing as a ultimate customer. Junie decided to make promotional videos showing their new feature on using local models but its Qwen 3.6-27b that can only run on a Mac M5 laptop and they showed it on a prop plane to say without internet.
Jet brains academy at the same time decided to make an anti AI vibe coding video about how people can't learn with AI.
I don't think they can compete with AI IDEs. They should maybe focus on the niche that they are good at, and completely get rid of anything ML/AI related. It's going to be a lot cheaper.
Manually refactor code in days if need be, when you have something specific in mind and intend a particular result.
'refactor' isn't just a blender. If I wanted agentic coding I would just do that. I'm quite happy for other people to so completely entangle themselves in agentic coding that they can't get out. Please proceed.
to add: I'm a paying JetBrains customer, but they could lose me if they vibecode themselves into a pile of slop. I'm not sure they're doing that, even if they're dabbling in it. I think there's still expertise there.
This would make sense for me, as a long time Jetbrains user and not desiring to use AI for anything apart from single line code completion, which the current Jetbrains tools do quite well.
I have used their support before, to be extremely impressed. This is an area that they could differentiate themselves in.
They could establish a foothold in AI accelerated development but they sadly aren't doing it, instead focusing on "developing agents" (aka openclaw/pi/codex/claude simulacrum #9998).
Around a year ago, the org I was working for ditched jetbrains (including teamcity) due to alleged Russian links of some of the founders/owners of jetbrains.
Never looked into it further, but might be a factor...
Jetbrains is one of the very tiny number of companies that actually severed their russian links.
Unlike others, like LG or Samsung, that put out a couple of press releases claiming they exited but in reality still do business including marketing or operating factories in russia. Or Apple that just switched all their business through neighboring countries and still continue to remove any app russian government demands and pays all the fines they get
Been a JetBrains customer for over a decade, that used to use several of their IDEs, but don't expect to renew again. IMO they completely dropped the ball on AI integration, everything they forced into the IDE seem to be an annoyance.
Turns out I can easily get by on VS Code / Claude / ChatGPT / Antigravity.
DataGrip is going to be hard to replace, but don't need anything more than the current version, hopefully they'll let me keep using it.
You could tell they were adrift and visionless when they started revamping the UI to look as much as VSCode as possible. Thankfully they kept the old version so far as a plugin at least, but I'm ready to jump ship if they drop it. Now they're trying to half heartedly copy as many AI products as possible instead of going all in on their core competencies. I used to be such a fan of JetBrains...
Obviously the narrative will be AI CLI impact but the quality of IntelliJ has taken such a nose dive that I was already looking for alternatives before Claude Code took over the world. IJ used to be one of my most respected pieces of software, it was solid, performant, and the new features were generally thoughtful and well done. That started changing around 2022 and the IDE has been driving the wrong way down a one way street since.
JetBrains is a privately held s.r.o. (LLC equivalent in the Czech Republic), I wonder where have Helgi Library gather so much detailed financial data from about them?
I’m trying to contextualize this information. JetBrains isn’t publicly traded best as I can tell, and these numbers come from other public filings:
> Figures are the company's own (unconsolidated) statutory statements filed with the Czech business register…
Are these as reliable as the U.S. 10K or its European equivalent?
I assume that a company like JetBrains would be investing in shifting products around A.I., so it doesn’t seem too surprising that they don’t report a profit for 2025.
then Sbirka listin and download the filings. It's all in Czech so put it through GPT for translation
Summary:
JetBrains s.r.o. went negative because a large foreign-exchange loss overwhelmed a much smaller operating profit. The report explicitly identifies CZK 1.516 billion of currency losses caused by the Czech koruna strengthening against major foreign currencies. But “it was just accounting” would be incomplete: operating profit also fell 63.2%. These accounts use Czech accounting rules, not IFRS.
So two separate things happened: operations deteriorated by CZK 1.291 billion, and the financial result deteriorated by CZK 2.016 billion. Lower taxes cushioned the fall rather than causing it. Approximately 61% of the deterioration before tax came from the financial section and 39% from operations.
For cash generation, the reported operating cash flow is positive—but requires caution. It increased from CZK 5.059 billion to CZK 6.353 billion. However, the 2025 statement includes CZK 6.672 billion of positive net working-capital adjustments, while its before-working-capital subtotal is negative CZK 60.926 million. The positive final figure therefore should not be read as CZK 6.353 billion of recurring cash earnings.
Removing only that disclosed currency loss would produce CZK 1,191.121 million of profit before tax. That is a mechanical sensitivity calculation—not an IFRS profit figure or a fully currency-neutral result. It leaves derivative gains and all other reported amounts unchanged, and it should not be treated as adjusted after-tax profit. The report says the 2025 “other financial income” line consists mainly of derivative income.
First, revenue is growing, assets - too. I believe company does some money burning to compete. According to the prev years nett income, they should have collected a reasonable amount of money so a little money burn doesn't harm.
Second, the Gross Profit is only 72.1m whereas the Revenue is 675m.
That means, 600m is somewhere in the COGS. Not sure how to read this.
The real surprise is how small their balance sheet is given they're such a well known and loved name. 16m CZK is 0.7m USD annual revenue.
There are companies where you'd rather be the owner, and others where you'd rather be an employee, or a customer. I think the JetBrain's customers are the real winners in this one.
I have no idea how Jetbrains are dropping the ball so hard now with agentic coding.
I still use their IDE, but I would love to see a realy native view on Claude Code, that actually shows a preview of an image I pasted for instance, in a view that feels native to the IDE.
I would love if the Jetbrains IDE's got really good agent integration,
all their code analysis could have amazing synergy with LLM's,
Unfortunatly for now I disabled all AI features as it was slowing my IDE (JetBrains) to a crawl.
It isn't as much the price of a license as much as the time it takes to get approval for newer engineers and contractors. You can just say, "we use vs code with these extensions and wsl2" and the discussion is over.
Either a whole lot of money is about to be sucked out of markets or money is about to massively devalue. This is the bill coming due for the zero interest rate years, seen from one company's vantage point.
Its pretty sad because JetBrains products are great ive been using them for a while and its even free for students. VSC is great but i feel like JB products are more refined since I code in Go and Python.
Unfortunate because they make great products, but also expected given AI. A bit like Nokia, they're a great company that didn't do anything particularly wrong but they got swept by a superior technology.
Jetbrains dropped the ball hard with Junie and their typescript performance bugs. I left cause of the latter and the former could never compete with the rest of the ecosystem.
I think I have been using their tools since they started. Jetbrains could have been Cursor of IDE world, but they missed it with so many confusing AI offering
An IDE connects a human coder to the development process. If the role of that coder changes in that process, the IDE connection is not going to be as heavy as it used to be.
This along with stack overflow seems to be the end of an era. Stack overflow had my back and JetBrains was like a super magical tool that I could tackle code bases with.
I am a long time JetBrains subscriber to the all products pack. Their response to recent AI events has been extremely lackluster and I've given them this feedback directly, in feedback and otherwise.
I doubt I will remain a subscriber for the entirety of next year.
Let's look at their AI product, it suuuuucks. They released it, and it literally did not function. I purchased it, and it kept giving me licensing errors. Contacted support and they couldn't tell me anything. Okay, cool, cancel it and refund me. This is useless.
That was a while ago. Today, it still sucks. AI Chat is a bolted-on afterthought that looks like a hackathon project and functions like one. Isn't deeply embedded in the editors. Clunky. Slow. Ugly to look at. Doesn't integrate nicely with all the tools. No native AI plugins, you're forced into their garbage.
10yr+ All Products Pack subber as well, cancelled in August.
They really didn't do well with AI integration the past few years. When Cursor was all the rage, JetBrains was pushing their own service whose pricing wasn't transparent and just didn't hold up to SotA. I'd still agree that using Codex or Claude from CLI is a better user experience.
Yet, looks like their revenue is up. Wonder where they're investing.
It's amazing that it even costs extra. Basic functionality shouldn't cost an extra fee, period.
I'm paying hundreds of dollars to use the IDE. The least they could do is integrate well with other harnesses (like every other text editor in the world does).
While the revenue is up so is the cost... and looking at what they've been doing I'd argue they are just burning money on questionable investments.
"Hey! Look! We grew to power by making perfect, powerful development IDE! Let's get a bunch DeZiGnErS on board to dumb it down and piss off everyone"
Yes, I HATE their new UIs (we are on the second take where we had NewUI and now it's Islands)... ClassicUI has almost 1m downloads because it makes the UI _sane_ and while I renewed my subscription for AllPack this year I've done it griting my teath... will see next year if I'll stick…
I think this is because it's still expensive to put themselves into some related businesses before there's not much need for a human UI IDE. But maybe it is now or never to get some of those products visible. If you don't have a little brand recognition now with some sign of historic existence you are going to be a crab in the AI slop bucket.
I don't have plans to stop using Jetbrains any time soon but I can't deny my satisfaction in their products has been declining for a couple of years. Still, nothing else is as good. I wish they'd spent a cycle or two on performance and bugs.
All the air is getting sucked out of software companies due to AI, I'm seeing it happen in a number of places. Though in this case it may be due to their own AI investment on internal projects.
On one hand I wonder if JetBrain could have done something like Cursor better with it's deep experience, and at the same time AI software driven can require a complete fresh perspective, and I do hope JetBrain can reimagine itself to meet software development where it's headed as supports will sorely be needed.
Editor use is on the decline. Heavy bulky IDEs like jetbrains has are close to extinct. After AI our company cancelled the jetbrains ide subscription, as no dev needed it. Most just use vscode or vim, and most stay in the terminal.
This is interesting to me because I only started using JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA specifically to do AI coding.
It was the first time I'd used an IDE, the first time I'd built a cross platform app, first time I'd used Kotlin, and the first time I'd tried AI coding.
The journey started with choosing KMP as the stack, then I figured "here's the company that released KMP, they have an IDE, they have AI, I'll use that".
It was really useful, and convinced me that AI coding was the future. I didn't know Kotlin (I still don't) and I don't look at any of the code. I do look at diffs sometimes (less and less). My main "review" is "reviewing test failures", which is a workflow I developed over the past year.
It was about 4 months into using it that I figured out that the IDE was really doing nothing.
I rewrote their worktree functionality as a couple of bash scripts. The build and test functionality was all gradle on the command line anyway. I was just using it as a chat interface and a markdown reader.
So I set up tmux and used Junie CLI (I liked Junie as an agent), Kimi Code and Pi Coding agent simultaneously on different projects. Junie CLI was pretty good, but it had too many instructions and when I started getting particular about my workflows, compliance was too difficult.
Kimi Code and Pi kept winning, eventually I stopped using Junie altogether. The name of the game was doing things in parallel and in the background. Editing the code had nothing to do with it.
The thing I missed was how JetBrains AI credits worked. I loved switching between models, and didn't want to tell everyone on the team to have their own accounts. I looked around and saw some LLM gateways and stuff like OpenRouter, but then they are all still charging extra, so I just wrote my own LLM gateway and connected it to Pi.
But then I was like "what is Pi really doing here?". I wanted a thing I could use from my phone, and using tmux over Termius is pretty weak, so I was like "Oh maybe I can have a mobile app that uses Pi as an API or something" but then I kept hearing the creator of Pi talk about how simple the coding loop was so I just wrote the coding loop into my LLM gateway and then created clients for it for iOS, android, macOS, windows and web, all using Kotlin Multiplatform.
Now I've got my dream coding agent: I create work trees at the touch of a button from my phone, I discuss with the agent using the "reply mode" interleaved reply feature, I have a flexible bash script based workflow engine, a centralised script/skill distribution framework, centralised billing/model gateway, all built into a single dev box that runs everything and can be deployed using one of those fancy curl -> bash pipeline things. I can deploy to dev, staging and production at the touch of a button from my phone. Dev and staging are IP gated behind CloudFlare tunnels, the production deployment goes straight to GCP, using a standardised framework.
My colleagues and I use it to ship real internal and external products and they're not even developers.
I haven't read any code or reviewed any "PRs". I don't even use GitHub or linear!! But man when I go for a walk and sit down on park benches and dictate to my coding agent in my phone, set the workflow running and then keep walking it feels like a super power!
And this was more or less 1 year from starting my first project using IntelliJ IDEA + Junie + OpenAI GPT 5 and winding up using a mix of models on my own platform that I share with my colleagues.
I don't understand how an IDE development company or, really, any "coding agent development" company can maintain a competitive edge in the face of that kind of pressure.
EDIT: I did find their Air product very intriguing but they didn't get it released quickly enough and it didn't solve the problem of having things running in the background easily enough. Also their worktree setup and teardown functionality was a bit of a drag. I built my own platform and started using it to build itself quicker than they got Air to the stage where I would want to use it. They STILL haven't released their mobile client.
I had the same problem with tmux on my phone so I made my own SSH app termphin.dev. I start Claude Code, lock my phone and come back later. Being able to code from anywhere really does feel like a superpower.
No disrespect meant, but I don't see how companies like JetBrains can survive (and I've read their financial statements, their revenue growth is still decent). All their revenue comes from products and services that are effectively a long-form agentic session, proven by how many OSS replicas of their stack is out there. Their Junie agent (itself a replica of all other agents on the market) can ITSELF be replicated in a few dozen prompts, as evidenced by the 1000+ GitHub agent repos out there, most of whom are operated by a single college student. What's worse is that JetBrains' primary customer base is supposed to be composed of technical users and developers, the exact cohort that should be skilled enough to use LLMs to replicate their services for effectively zero cost. I guess the only thing that's saving them is inertia and goodwill.
It's much more work to make a cross platform GUI app with C++, even if your toolkit is cross platform like Qt. Different compiler tool chains, different system level API's, ARM vs x64 etc.
This is why we see so many Electron apps these days (though Jetbrains was shipping IDE's before electron existed).
> It's much more work to make a cross platform GUI app with C++, even if your toolkit is cross platform like Qt. Different compiler tool chains, different system level API's, ARM vs x64 etc.
Well, that's the entire idea of those multi-platform frameworks: they take that off your hands.
Yep, I don't remember the last time I opened up an IDE anymore. I mainly built my own open source AI coding orchestrator lol: https://github.com/saadnvd1/agent-os
The landscape is changing significantly, and I think these types of tools will become more popular.
Yep. Especially considering their primary userbase are technically apt developers, there's zero reason to use any of their products. Especially given how quickly the landscape is changing.
why this is a surprise? I have 0 reasons to buy IDE in 2026.
Their main moat was smart refactor, and a few other nice tools to debug. regardless of what you think about coding is done, agents and your harness is the best tool. I heard they doing business accelerator to find a new business ideas. But as a company, hardly imagine anyone buying expensive IDE in 2 years. Why?
IDEs are on a steep decline, so not so surprising. I've disabled most code extensions from vscode and find myself using multiple terminals and the built in git diff UI. I barely see the code _as a whole_, only care about the _code_ changes.
edit: added the extra words + I must mention I'm talking about legacy maintenance projects
All the death knell comments - Is no one looking at the revenue line? Revenue still trending the same. Costs presumably haven't skyrocketed. They've invested in something big. Thats probably a good thing, and often needed to evolve.
Yeah look at the details below. Revenue is up 6% (which is not amazing but still growth). But staff expenses are up 34.2%. And the real big hint is "Cash Flow From Investing" plunging from -83 million $USD to -469. That's massive. They're staffing up and investing in... something.
> and investing in... something.
Reads like aimlessly burning whatever they felt they were able to burn without existential risk on some "also ran" LLM sinkhole.
In other words: nothing to see here, same as everybody else.
I still have this naive notion that we don't need LLMs for code generation and editing. Does a system need the knowledge of the full works of Shakespeare to be able to output Javascript?
Maybe people smarter than me know better but couldn't there be a middle ground where an IDE/Editor has an embedded engine (doesn't need to be a full-on LLM) that doesn't require external tool calls and token spend?
If an organization is paying $2400/year per developer for tokens and a highly intelligent editor/IDE comes around that charges $1000/yr and gets more output at a fixed cost, its a no-brainer of a decision.
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.
I was inclined to listen to your take… then you started talking about having 6 graphics cards in your computer and acting like that’s a normal thing that people do…
The other pitfall here is that we are tempted to compare this crazy setup to frontier models when the real comparison is running this same model in OpenRouter.
This 6 GPU setup will probably outspend OpenRouter on electricity alone.
These are 6 year old cards as one poster below pointed out. It is a normal thing people do, and many more people would if the prices were not made bonkers by few large companies vacuuming entire advanced chips manufacturing capacity just to lock those chips in warehouses.
If all those nvidia gpus the hyperscalers bought were online the cost to rent a single b200 wouldn't be $50 and hour and you could buy those 6 year old gpus I use for $200 each. Not almost $2k a pop they sold for now.
> the cost to rent a single b200
A 180gb b200 on runpod is $6.8/hr. Nowhere near $50/hr.
The _most expensive_ on-demand b200 rental I can find is $11.2/hr. There's a number of websites around these days that track GPU rental prices across different services: gpus.io, gpu.watchworks.dev (vast and runpod only), gputracker.net (not free, lol), gpurentalprices.com, priceofcompute.com, rentgpu.org, etc (I'm only looking at the first page of search results for GPU rental prices tracker search). Most of these don't include vast or runpod, but all of them show prices under $10, mostly around $6/hr for b200.
no typical person is going to buy 6 GPUs unless those are 6 dies on a single card.
Ergo 6 GPUs isn't a typical setup, never has been and most likely never will.
OP is a classic outlier dev who is able and willing to set up and maintain such a thing - most normal people aren't.
Yeah but they're from 2020. Normal people in a few years might have that in their laptops, just clocked way down to save on power.
That's what, the same as a Mac studio?
Keep in mind that GPU iteration cycles are slowing down significantly for some time now, so "a GPU from 2020" can actually mean NVIDIA RTX 3090 with 24 GB VRAM, one of the best cards you can buy in 2026 for local LLM use; in fact buying one used is probably the best choice right now, because newer generation RTXes are crazy expensive.
My GPUS are Rtx3090s with 24GB ram. You guessed correctly.
I do not enjoy the fact those cards cost more than their msrp 6 years later, but there is a much more important consideration than money (which also makes sense, but about that later). It is the fact soon people will not be able to do my job without AI at all. Even now if I didn't use it I think I'd be out competed very quickly.
And having the ability to run it locally, using a really useful, not toy model is very useful. It makes you independent from Anthropic deciding to ban your account for example.
As for money, it is an open secret the biggest cost of coding agents use is input tokens not generation. I tend to use about 1.3B input tokens per week on claude code with only 7-8M out. Out if this 80% is cached. And the cache is pretty restrictive. You have 5min cache and 1h cache. If you don't keep reading over that time your cache expires on the cloud. Then your 500k context counts as 500k input in its entirety.
And the numbers I mentioned would cost thousands of USD a week at API prices.
But when you control inference, you can keep your cache for as long as you want and save it to disk.
I tend to have up to 10 coding agent sessions open at a time. Some are used once a week. I never use more than 5 at the same moment. Having 15 full contexts cached in RAM basically moves my local cache utilisation to 95%+
Basically I think the AI companies will soon require us to pay the real price for the inference. I prefer to be ready.
I have two. I paid <$1000 for each, before this craziness started. They work, sure, but 48GB of VRAM is just not enough to use a local LLM like a cloud model.
we use that same model at our company, it powers not only our devs but also many business needs. We rent 1 gpu (B300), it costs around 10x less than the api costs
Do you rent from AWS or some other provider? I wonder if there are issues with on-demand rent for those high-end GPU instances, is capacity always there or sometimes it is unavailable?
I don't touch AWS. We rent from an european provider. Demand can be tricky for serverless/spot-pricing. We have an always-on server so, no issues.
If there's some cost or availability question you have, AWS has some complicated bullshit to solve the problem for you. Check out reserved instances.
Normal for r/localllama or r/localllm maybe
Can you tell more about the class of problems that need Fable?
Not the person to whom you responded, but several times I have been dealing with debugging. Issue, tried. Opus/Sol/whatever and come up dry, then thrown it at Fable and gotten the solution in one shot.
One example of a "hobby grade" problem that only fable could resolve that I had no time to mess around with.
I have a home network consisting of multiple buildings, a server room with a k8 cluster and various devices, some Cctv cameras, redundant fiber links between buildings, ftth Internet and lte backup, and so on. Not a simple network. All on Mikrotik switches using a lot of modern features like L3 in hardware routing. All properly designed, servers are multi homed with 10G DAC cables between switched.
Occasionally I'd notice few second drops when observing Cctv from my cameras on the monitor attached to my pc. Pc on the 10G.
Also occasionally I'd get random devices (android TV) decide "it has no Internet) for a minute at a time.
Also occasionally I'd have my AI take 20s to answer when I know for a fact it is doing absolutely nothing.
First I looked into it myself and I found nothing. No misconfiguration etc. Then I used opus with it. It found no network drops on any interfaces etc. But it wrote a script that opened 10k connections, kept them open and sent traffic through them. This was tried to all my k8 nodes and one node would occasionally refuse to open 0.1% of these connections.
Opus decided it must be a network card or a DAC cable. It took ages to identify which. I replaced both, problem went away for weeks each time and then returned every time.
Opus had a bajillion ideas to mess with my network config. Thankfully I know enough about networking not to let it take me on a wild goose chase.
Then I used Fable. Fable took 5 minutes and found the server grade Nic card's driver I use has a known rare problem where in certain configuration the default memory buffers for some hardware offload feature are too small for it and when connections get opened rapidly it sometimes chokes.
But there are two nodes with exact same config. Why only one was affected? Actually both were affected, but on one it was so rare I had to run the testing for hours to notice it.
The memory was increased and the problem... Became a lot rarer. Not resolved completely.
Fable again. This time it came up with an idea there must be a bug in the active/standby part of the driver where it occasionally let's some traffic through the standby interface. Which makes the switches ARP learn the standby as the correct path to that mac and send a portion of that traffic there, but the standby couldn't receive traffic.
It setup tcpdump on both the standby and live and proved indeed it was happening. I do not remember how this was resolved, but it was and for last 4 weeks the problem is gone.
I have actual programming problems too. 4 of which I turned into a personal Ai benchmark. Only fable solves all 4.
A hint: Large complex software architecture design and planning.
Doubt. High level plans have less detail to worry about.
> Does a system need the knowledge of the full works of Shakespeare to be able to output Javascript?
Turns out that actually - no. Researchers have managed to prune half the Experts in a MoE model that had a low probability of getting activated during coding tasks, resulting in a more focused model:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16721
Main benefit is that it greatly reduces the amount of RAM required to run these models. Of course you could just cache those unused experts on disk instead, but the main point here is that you know which ones matter.
But aside from that recent models, like Qwen3.8-27b are reportedly more durable under heavy quantisation, e.g. 3bits or even ternary. With additional techniques like TurboQuant, you can feasibly run these models on consumer hardware - even if at 1/4th the speed you'd get from rented infrastructure.
VS Code has extensions such as Kilo Code or llama-vscode which let you work with local models much like you would with cloud based solutions.
> "Does a system need the knowledge of the full works of Shakespeare to be able to output Javascript?"
If the implementation brief says "attempting a reconnect in this handler would be a wild goose chase", the model needs to know enough Shakespeare, at least indirectly, to understand that expression...
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.
Depends on what exactly you want to change. Lsp can do a lot but only in very simple changes.
Intellij when I used to use it had a lot great features like refactoring, extracting part of code as a function, renaming and creating empty classes/boilerplate but that's it
In current job I can order LLM to take data sink from other endpoint and write new with given URL. It will fetch from endpoint, check what it gives, compare with other and write new sink. Then it needs polishing because it always create something as awful as possible with cloning data all around but the most boring and soul sucking part is done
This is why I am working on https://github.com/spockz/semantic-editor. To bring more powerful editing functionality to agents. In a way that attaches to their chain of thought and deals with their probabilistic framing in json so it all works out cheaper and faster.
LLMs at my work have access to Slack chat history, the Wiki, the complete git history, (AI generated) notes from every in person meeting team meeting, JIRA, all code reviews, and all production logs, as well as your personal email (when you run it yourself)
They can typically explain the history of something faster than any human
How does your agent wire all the information? Does it use MCP for all of them or do you use another method to access or collect the data? and how does it resolve contradictions (one source say one thing, another say otherwise).
It's a totally fair question. I'm personally wondering if there's a half way point. Some kind of structured language that isn't plain English that a "dumb" LLM is able to parse. It could be human written, or it could be written by a "smart" LLM at a greater cost.
The more we go in that direction we closer we get to reinventing frameworks in a more compute heavy way.
It just so happens that there's no framework (outside silos) for many specific tasks, and AI is the workaround to surface those patterns.
Looking at what Jev has shown, and what is being done in the space. I think you are right that there’s probably a lot of room for performance improvement on specific tasks and workflows that will be happening in the next few years
I also imagine it could be a big shakeup if all of a sudden models could run on CPU. Imagine running an Astra-level coding agent, locally on your laptop. All of a sudden GPUs wouldn’t look as valuable, if you don’t need them as much
We are still some time away from that, but it seems like progress is being made
We’re conditioned to interact with language models as chatbots and in that sense strong language understanding (implicit - some sort of world knowledge), is probably necessary for that?
But I’m sure we can have a small model that’s really strong at programming concepts, JavaScript syntax, and that’s about it. You’d interact with it differently, at specific seams in your code base - review a PR, merge two functions together, investigate these logs.
Or maybe I’m just not adequately absorbing the bitter lesson. Idk
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.
> If an organization is paying $2400/year per developer for tokens
My employer is spending $50,000/yr per employee on tokens, and they're not alone
I would say paying 50,000 USD per year for tokens to double productivity is cheap.
And hopefully they are just paying that per developer, not per employee.
No kidding. As a small employer I expect to be spending $200 a month so each employee can have an OAI or Claude 20x sub, or else spend it on the Chinese prepaid tokens of their choice.
I have a feeling that when all the AI-hype dust settles, what you describe will be the killer app of AI. That, ChatBots and unstructured data processing. Huge productivity improvements but not the sci-fi hype of today.
This is exactly what the frontier models are trying to do!
Check this graph:
https://paraplouis.github.io/llm-pareto-frontier/
I don't need AI in the same way that I don't need autocomplete. I can definitely program without autocompletion, but I'm a lot slower than others who use it
> Does a system need the knowledge of the full works of Shakespeare to be able to output Javascript?
The same can be said about software engineers. The tricky thing is, it's hard to separate a subset of knowledge from the whole, for both human beings and LLMs
It is very difficult to predict ahead of time what knowledge a model would need to understand a prompt to generate a program. It could refer to all kinds of real world knowledge referring to the kinds of entities you want the program to model.
> Does a system need the knowledge of the full works of Shakespeare to be able to output Javascript?
What language do you plan on prompting it in?
I plan to use english, but not 1500's english.
That might be a bad example ... replace english with nearly anything not related to prompting/coding. For example, I bet the models have "knowledge" of biology, chemistry, etc. not exactly useful for programming a SaaS web app that say does project mgmt. I think there's opportunity for very specific tooling rather than "general" knowledge.
I don't train LLMs myself, but my impression is that general knowledge has lead to more intelligent behavior on specific tasks. The voluminous training set is imporant.
But even besides that... Yesterday I prompted a feature by referencing a specific Monty Python skit. Does the coding tool need to know Monty Python? Maybe I could describe the feature in other terms, but it sure was convenient to have this shared knowledge. I don't see why Shakespeare would be any different.
CodeRabbit emits LLM generated poetry in its comments so maybe more than you'd think?
I suppose how much literary support you need in your model depends directly on how erudite the comments are.
Would there be problem domains in which the more educated LLM would perform better? Are your names directly related to concepts from said domain,
LLM comments: "I think it may be a potential bug that the sum VATAddedTax gets added to the TaxFreeItems".
I mean it seems a bit unnecessary but also maybe it can help in unexpected ways.
Because we don't need code
func randomName () { desired machine physics }
Everything around "desired machine physics" is superfluous wank; historically a biz case stored as code when some UI could feed biz case params go a function generator
Come on we know what we use computers for; media consumption and 2D data entry/review. Locally we just need a core engine for geometric transforms of visual state. What all these languages give us ability to create such a generic VM filled with customized semantics that mean nothing to solving the problem but plenty to a clever coder.
Kind of like Unicode we need distilled geometry primitives like "teapot for text" and desktop metaphors and to let people put the superfluous wank at the presentation layer
Which text used to be so making UI out of layers of text, OOP, and such made sense for decades
But we're just engaged in bloating system state through def jargon_to_encapsulate { desired machine physics } when we already know it's going to be simulated 3D or 2D visual transforms. We don't need to capture all those states in code verbatim.
Things like Jev are the future of models. Fine tuned on transforms given a context. "So you want to replicate GTA5? Here's a data set of geometric shapes and gradients constraints from all observed xyz" pipe that into your local renderer
We're entering the phase of software engineering (and engineering generally) where we realized we been dramatically over playing the song and can strip out entire asides and digressions, circumlocutions of provenance, to tighten up pacing and improve enjoyment of the outcomes. Hopefully. Or we kill ourselves. Through social squabbles (political, economic, religious, whatever) due to laziness to learn etiquette, and environmental destruction.
Did you learn english or C first?
I learned C first, then Perl. Sometimes I get an epiphany that terms I use in programming have meanings other than what it means in programming.
But you learned English (or some other human language) before either of those..
Well, the post I’m replying to says that English was learned first, and I’m saying that I learned Perl before I learned English.
I don't think LLM needs to know Shakespeare to understand: "attempting a reconnect in this handler would be a wild goose chase." I would even bet that most people learned of this expression before reading Romeo and Julie.
> Does a system need the knowledge of the full works of Shakespeare to be able to output Javascript?
Probably not unless you're writing tooling relevant to literature or prose, but I can't imagine trusting jetbrains (or any ai studio) to curate this.
I'm not an expert, but I think that:
1. Storing Shakespeare's work costs almost no $ in regards to disk space.
2. If the prompt doesn't include "Shakespeare" or relevant terms then no regression is performed for that topic and therefore there is no effective token cost.
Someone may correct me, but I think it's not a big $ win to exclude relevant topics from the models' overall capabilities. Instead you'd tune weights so that #2 better identifies what is or isn't among the relevant terms on which to run regressions.
I think you're probably missing the forest for the trees here... broadly speaking, these multibillion "parameter" (whatever that actually means) models store a lot more than shakespeare, and have storage costs in the 100s of GB/TB (which translates to $$$$$$ in SSD/RAM costs), nevermind the (kilos/mega/giga)watts involved, all the pollution, etc...
Meanwhile, a template (maybe a couple KB) costs less than a couple cents to store and run. Large Languages Models are not really interesting, (smaller) LLMs that only contain "what you need" are.
To me it feels like the difference between crows and humans. Yes crows are smart, but what we really want are all inclusive models capable of human "thinking" . I guess we probably need a mix of both so we can give the crows the easy jobs freeing up resources.
Right but if the cost difference is negligible, as I've pointed out in another comment, in what case would you prefer to tell the crow twice to do something that a better weighted large model could do in one prompt?
I don't see it. In every case my time is more valuable than the cost of the prompt (so far) so the higher dollar cost, one shot, "getter done" model is the better net value option.
This is especially true when taking into account that the crow doesn't just fail on a single prompt, it does something much worse. It creates new problems that need to be undone afterwards. It confidently duplicates, triplicates, etc. a damaging work output that then needs more and more work to clean up before starting over.
Claude Fable 5.1 currently estimates its own total data set at 45TB.
That's a trivial number for sharing between a small user base of, in my case, 150 employees.
What am I missing? You're talking about maybe $60k retail cost in high read speed SANs that are likely already in place for a business of this size anyway? (Probably purchased a few years ago for under $30k. At least mine are.) In a US data center I'm paying a flat rate for rack space, so power consumption isn't a consideration anyway, but honestly it really isn't that much power even if I was being billed for it.
It's really nothing. An overlooked line item on a budget sheet.
So the real cost if I were to self host is video cards. But as mentioned previously, that's not reduced by smaller data sets, it's reduced by better weighted models, right? Let me know if I'm mistaken, please.
I'm very interested to be persuaded otherwise as a decision maker. Thanks for your insight and ideas.
Considering all of the above, I'm currently of the mind that a lower cost model that makes more mistakes is much more expensive in net, actually. So I prefer the most accurate, better weighted model, not the slimmer data set.
> Maybe people smarter than me know better but couldn't there be a middle ground where an IDE/Editor has an embedded engine (doesn't need to be a full-on LLM) that doesn't require external tool calls and token spend?
IDEA already have small LLM for one line code completion IIRC.
But the gain people want from LLM is generally "here, add this entire feature" or "here, go thru every dependency's changelog and update code to work with latest version". Those are not small LLM tasks
Great idea! It’d be something like Common Business Oriented Language, or COBOL for short.
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.
My gut says the economics, e.g hardware/data center/resource constraints, are going make the economics of small specialized models more attractive. Without any evidence whatsoever, I also think that the big frontier companies will have to de-emphasize chatbots as huge models in favor of chatbots as huge products with a much much more granular mixture of experts approach, but with much smaller models. I’ve been saying for a while now that AI products have to hit the gas on prioritizing product design to reliably solve real people’s problems in predictable-enough ways, because the current approach is only really appealing to enthusiasts, developers, or optimistic managers, and with the kind of money they’re throwing around, that’s not going to work.
My gut is that you could distill 98% of what's currently being done inside LLMs into a classical knowledge base/inference engine and only use the language models for natural language processing and an oracle for brainstorming and cut most of the computational cost and hallucinations out.
I certainly wouldn’t complain about that setup if it worked.
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.
These specialized tools already deliver tremendous value. What happens on the backend financially is of no concern to me, as I have no influence over it.
> Does a system need the knowledge of the full works of Shakespeare to be able to output Javascript?
That's needed to interpret the 10000 monkeys typing requirements in the various corporate product roles /s
I think they're in the perfect position to take a stab at actually monetizing a "just-works-and-good-enough" local code-assistant that works well enough to save people on burning tokens with the big providers and/or keeping their data offline for regulatory reasons (ie also selling to customers that CANNOT use Claude or OpenAI).
1: Local models are catching up quickly
2: Visual Studio Intellicode (not to be confused with Intellisense) was/is surprisingly good at suggestions (when it first appeared before people went over to CLI's I felt that it was almost magically good for it's time, turned off co-pilot and whatever backend for a reason of compliance for a local workspace and the suggestions are quite good still even if not on the same level as the frontier suggestions).
If it pans out, with their brand people many would probably be happy to fork over for a Jetbrains licence.
JetBrains Air
> without existential risk
To do nothing is to die. I've been a JetBrains subscriber for over a decade. Nobody is going to use their tools in five years. I certainly don't need my subscription anymore.
> on some "also ran" LLM sinkhole.
They can't do Junie. It's a dead end. They can't do the same thing everyone else is doing either, or they're exactly as you put it: an "also ran" in a very crowded field.
The only way for JetBrains to survive is to figure out their Garmin play. They either find some niche within the existing product or - maybe (and very improbably) - they can innovate something wild nobody else has figured out yet that provides a path to new fertile pasture. But that's more the startup path than the thriving incumbent facing innovator's dilemma path.
But no matter what, if they stay the course, they're dead. Just like half the people expecting to still be writing code by hand.
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 :-)
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.
Can't agents just use a language server? There are already a bunch of projects that provide this, e.g.: https://www.agent-lsp.com/
Doesn't seem like a huge differentiator anymore?
I don't really know much about their current users, but from a business perspective, post-tokenmaxxing and them having an IDE, it seems like the most efficient environment for having a human in the loop is something they could tackle?
Well nobody needs to use IDE. There were always people who used vim with tmux as their IDE. The value of IDE is the I as in integrated - I see some value in having easy to manage single dev environment with batteries included. (I'm not an IDE guy though, and I personally closer to vim/vscode + plugins)
There were always people who used vim with tmux as their IDE.
But until language servers, IDEs with built-in code analysis had a huge advantage. This stopped once LSP was designed and some language servers got mature. LSP was developed originally by VS Code and it is easy to see why - it allowed VS Code to compete with IDEs without writing their own code analysis by letting language developers write a standard server. This made VS Code (and others like Zed) so powerful, that they had already replaced IDEs for many users (maybe outside Java). LLMs are just another nail in the coffin.
> This stopped once LSP was designed
No, it didn't stop. In my experience, LSPs are still incredibly poor and comparatively primitive vs the actual analysis that JetBrains have implemented. It's night-and-day different in terms of the supported refactorings, actual understanding of the types and the codebase etc.
Also, LSP is just poorly designed and inefficient. JSON-RPC was an awful choice, the specification text is not well-written and the whole thing feels like a Microsoft pet project for VS Code than an open specification that everyone agrees works well.
I think the name misleads people about LSPs. LSPs are basically plugins for VS Code. The protocol semantics are visual, so they're tied to what VS Code wanted to display on screen. They don't really change the game, especially as you always had the option of using IDEA's own plugins in other tools and text editors (yes! there is an API and you can start up a headless IDEA to access it, even from programs written in C or Rust).
Not many did that because JetBrains never cared much to properly document this path, and so using LSPs is a better paved cowpath. But that's because IDEs aren't a real business for Microsoft, whereas they are for JetBrains, and we know where that leads - the landscape is filled with the skeletons of dead IDEs that were just loss making corporate side projects, defunded and "donated" to some foundation once the executive sponsors moved on. NetBeans and Eclipse are two of the most obvious but there have been others.
The risk with VS Code is it goes the same way. Eventually Microsoft needs to cut back, perhaps due to needing more capital for AI or due to AI related losses, and in the general layoffs that follow VS Code gets cut back to a skeleton crew.
This is not the whole picture. IDE is not just for writing code. What I really like on jetbrains is how strong the platform is. I will show you example which would be great if they implement it.
If you use ideavim you can enable feature which shows you action ID you have currently triggered (Ideavim: Track action IDs). If you click on anything it will show you name of that action and you can setup vim shortcut for that. This way, you can use almost anything by just typing a few letters. But that is just a start.
Now imagine you can use this to create "macro" which will create something like skill for LLM. So in a few seconds to minutes you can create "skills"/runbooks for major refactorings, project updates, git bisections, project deployments, log analysis or whatever you can think of. You will just click on 20 features and it will record what you did with some additional context (files, connected services, build systems etc.). This is the strength of integrated tools.
Of course this is just my imagination but I am not the smartest person in the world and I am pretty sure/hope that someone in jetbrains or in other IDE company is thinking this way.
IDEs are designed for humans. LLMs aren't human. They can analyze and process craptons if text in seconds.
You envision a world in which humans don't look at code.
I think that world is farther off than you think, especially in critical line of business software. You can YOLO it with your internal dashboard or your hipster coffee review site, but in my 2M-line highly regulated banking system, humans sign off on the code - even if LLMs do most of the typing.
My last post was not about writing or processing code at all.
And their MCP servers and tools are great! But I wish they’d remember that some of us also actually code in the IDE, because human usage quality of their IDEs has been getting worse in that time…
You are right, they fix even most annoying bugs really slowly. I also remember something like 2 years ago when they made pycharm unusable with poetry for several months and the release was like 18th of December (who decided to release tool for work as Christmas gift :-D ). The good thing is that you can always revert to older version and wait for proper fix.
Not using tooling (or not creating one) for repeating tasks and trying to one shot everything with latest frontier model is a difference between the bill for AI usage being 10 Eur or 10000 Eur
While I "vibe code" more and more these days, an IDE that still does code highlighting, I can use it to look up functions source and so on, it is very useful to be able to figure out what the LLM did.
And yes, there are people who use vim in a screen session, but I don't fit into that category. I like my GoLand IDE.
And while there are a ton of IDEs out there, I use what I'm used to.
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.
> 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
You could argue that Claude Code and Codex are a sort of IDE, just a very different one to what came before. But they are environments for coding.
I remember around 2019 or so they shipped their first AI feature and there was a huge backlash for it. Did that change their direction in anyway? Obviously 2026 is a way different landscape than back then.
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.
I mostly use it to review and tweak the changes LLMs make. However it feels like a pretty weak use case for the price involved.
> 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 look at it as like being able to start a fire in the woods without a lighter. It’s a skill, a helpful one even on the extremely rare occasions that it’s necessary. But realistically with even the bare minimum amount of prep, not a useful one.
How many people out there can do hand lithography to make an 8086 to bootstrap computing? One?
If you have a deadline for starting a fire you won't be happy looking at an unskilled person holding a lighter under a bunch of wet twigs.
> How many people out there can do hand lithography to make an 8086 to bootstrap computing? One?
What does THAT have to do with whether people who dont use AI today will die soon? What does "hand lithography" have to do with literally anything here?
Common? Did you mean come on?
They picked weird direction. "Here, pay ENTIRE EXTRA SUB to use the LLM we made that is worse than one you're already using".
Yeah, no, vast majority just want to pick a AI vendor and integrate it into their IDEA or CLion or whatever other editor they were already using. Pushing into entirely different subscription was dead on arrival.
They figured that out and started integrating it into main tooling (https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/33314-air), but they definitely wasted a bunch of resources on something nobody really wanted.
This was so annoying as a long time subscriber- we were begging them to get / let us integrate some of the more mainstream models - didn’t help that there early model was terrible
> 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!)
I'm not a fan of VS Code myself, but everyone I know uses it (except for people I myself have influenced into using something else). It truly is a sort of default editor these days.
I guess it depends on your niche; I spend half my time coding Golang and Python, and the other half terraform, ansible, perl and I use other languages now and again for small projects and utilities.
In the devops/sysadmin world my stack would be common, and mostly people pick an editor and stick to it. I've been using Emacs for the past 20+ years at this point, and the last time I used Microsoft's IDE was back in the day when I was writing desktop apps using MFC (which probably dates me pretty well!) with visual studio.
I've seen colleagues use anything from atom, vim, emacs, notepad++, and other generic editors whos name I didn't recognize. There are one or two instances of VS Code I see now and again, but they're the outlier rather than the norm in my professional life.
It's vim vs emacs of this generation. Vscode is vim and intellij is emacs I guess. It does everything.
The future is in AI. An IDE without AI integration is no longer a marketable product.
People are not going to stop using AI no matter what your concerns or feelings are.
I use IntelliJ without any AI and then Claude runs in Ghostty tabs. I find this quite optimal.
I was a big IDE user since they existed (I used Visual C++ beta releases in 1992). However, since adopting AI tools I really haven't used an IDE. Once in a while for things I don't know how to do without one (e.g. view a markdown file locally). That's it though.
How much? Are they burning tokens to heat the offices?
I've always been a JB fan. But the last few updates have been quite rough, and they really don't seem to have worked out the AI thing at all.
> … they really don't seem to have worked out the AI thing at all.
Who has?
That's straight-up incorrect. A massive new investment is by definition expense-neutral.
Negative cash flow from investing means that some prior investment has been shown to be worth far less than they paid for it.
When you buy land it's cash flow negative and net value neutral isn't it?
Just a semi-educated guess....they plowed a bunch of cash into an "AI native" IDE product after getting spooked by Cursor.
Most of their products have an AI harness embedded and it works well, at least for me. Has tools to let the models access proper debugging too(my experience is Clion) so that my build is available to them even when using remote/docker builds. The integration with codex works well too.
They host a lot of models too, and that is probably where they burned the cash.
I really like the way air works. the big reason I dont use it is because they have refused to support elixir which is my daily driver language.
I love that I can use browse the code in it and inline my comments for my prompts and send out all my requests into a single prompt
I hope they are not investing in tokens. I say this as ex-JetBrainer. I want JetBrains to succeed but what it would in the IDE landscape?
Cost of services is up. I suspect that's where the token cost comes into play, but they didn't "invest" in tokens. They can't call that an investment anyway. The increase in cost of services relative to revenue impacts net income - we can see that in prior years - but that's not the whole story. Total assets on the balance sheet increased at the same time net income decreased. They spent money on something of value.
Why couldn’t they capitalize token spend?
Could they label that as investing in such a report? Sounds misleading. Investing to me means paying for something you then own afterwards, paying for AI sounds like a normal expense.
https://junie.jetbrains.com/ probably.
No idea why they thought they can compete with frontier AI labs on that, it's entirely waste of money
They also tried to push AI feature set as a separate subscription which is just insane in current tooling market.
All users wanted is good integration of multi-AI providers in their base offering. I think they are slowly shifting to that but that's a lot of money wasted already
For the same reason that Rivian won’t add CarPlay. And Chamberlain locks out hacks to manage your garage door via HomeKit.
These companies see the interfaces with the customer moving into domains they lack the taste and capability to compete.
They want to own that channel even if it is to spam them with ads like BMW did with the Spider-Man “special feature.”
Or Chamberlain has (reportedly) playing with the location of buttons and ads in their “app.”
Rivian, BMW, Chamberlain have the market dominance to ignore what customers want.
Jetbrains does not but had / has to try.
They integrated air recently into intellij, and I believe it's quite fruitful. You can use any agent you want, they can work locally, in separate worktrees, or remotely and you can switch between them, and merge their results back properly.
Perhaps they're concerned they'll lose market share to other IDEs that integrate AI better
Dying of FOMO.
> ...the real big hint is "Cash Flow From Investing" plunging from -83 million $USD to -469. That's massive. They're staffing up and investing in... something.
...or they're bailing out of really bad investments before they become even worse ones...
> They're staffing up and investing in... something
You're suggesting "investing" is like R&D?
Investing is when you buy stocks or bitcoin and hope. Except for 1 year, their "investments" have always lost, last year about 50% of total assets:
-908 -4,374 3,970 -1,946 -10,273
"Investing" is traditionally how money is skimmed: something's sold to a friend at an inflated price that only becomes recognized as such years later amidst some other cover/crisis (if not after a statute of limitations). The other option is sweetheart deals - unneeded property leases, jobs for friends, etc. - but those are a bit more traceable, while investments can have multiple shell-company layers and complex derivatives.
Apparently, no one commenting knows how to read financial statements. They look at one item and assume the company is going out of business. Meanwhile, their total assets have increased. Cost of services have increased significantly over recent years - mostly commensurate with revenue growth, although the gap has been shrinking. Operating costs have been pretty flat. I don't have time to investigate where they spent the money, but the company is not at risk. They brought in more money than in prior years and spent it on something. That's it.
Jetbrains has been pushing Junie real hard, my guess is that they've been giving out too many cheap tokens to try to stay relevant as Claude and friends pull people away from the IDE.
In everyone's day jobs where they used an IDE 5 years ago, or even a year ago, are those jobs abandoning the IDE?
I still use Visual Studio in my day job, where Claude's output while VERY helpful, requires my ownership of everything, meaning I am inspecting every single line it changes. If a change is bigger than I think it should, I kill it before I commit.
I know I don't HAVE to use an IDE for that, but if the change is small enough, I am faster than asking Claude to understand the subtext behind my personal context of the product, and the IDE is supremely helpful for making a quick change across a handful of files.
> meaning I am inspecting every single line it changes.
I think this is changing fast. Pressure is increasing on devs for output, and most devs I know are no longer inspecting lines. I have devs in my business unit who claim to not have looked at code for months, except on certain rare occasions. I am not a developer and this week I've been given access to the repo to build my own apps and extensions. There's a "review" between commit and deploy, but there's no chance the Tech Lead can manually review everything, so that's getting done by AI too.
I know this horrifies a lot of devs, but these tools are shockingly good and we are not seeing an increase in bugs. In fact our automated detections (also AI assisted) are reducing the number of customer reported critical bugs.
I really think the days of inspecting every line are over.
This type of codebases will become a goldmine for cybersec in the near future. Except by then, only few people will be able to detect them or fix them. LLMs will leave the hardest problems and most difficult bugs plus and plethora of devs who either have skill atrophy or haven't learn these things in the first place.
Actually, cybersecurity seems to be the area that LLMs shine the most at; though it needs directing to actually look for the problem, LLMs have been able to find security faults in code that is well-vetted and written by experts.
I don’t think this is accurate. Our AI testing is finding exploits we’ve had in our codebase for 15 years. No human ever detected it. No deterministic tests. Our apps are getting more secure, not less.
It's an interesting philosophic question. LLMs tend to be overly verbose and defensive in coding. It's not a ton of extra complexity but it makes the code harder to follow for a human. But if a human is not writing the code how much does that matter?
I agree that they have gotten shockingly good. It's been a long time since I've seen them do something that is objectively wrong. Once we get closer to the "too cheap to meter" cost level things will change radically again.
Have you ever tried to use an LLM to add a feature to a really nice, pre 2023 codebase? It’s incredible how much easier it is to do, how much of a difference you instantly feel
I don't think I've ever had a job with a nice code base
> It's not a ton of extra complexity but it makes the code harder to follow for a human.
It is. I have seen Claude chasing after endless amount of edge cases that are just irrelevant in real usage especially for the kind of users we are supporting. At some point you need to stop reasoning about all those cases because it has zero benefit.
But it IS a ton of complexity and blows out context windows. Less code good. More code bad. Both for human and agent. Somehow, still only human can make code less.
Yes and….no. I have seen this play out at a large corp to spectacularly awful results. Talking 60k line react nextjs apps where every use effect has a linter silenced because the ai gave up on writing correct react code.
I have seen millions wasted because someone trusted an ai scripts calculation of a metric from the bottom of the org that led the top of the org to make a wrong decision only to laugh about ai. There is value but ffs read the god damn code. You can have the cake and eat it too. If the volume of code is so large you cannot read it, maybe it isnt worth shipping?
Or are you one of the ones pushing the real code reading on to others which seems to be common. Yes i can have agents vibe out 10 features and have my coworkers suffer fixing it in reviews.
What IS useful are the AI reviews. They catch bugs, not all are bugs but they do catch some. It is almost like they are better at finding logical issues across millions of tokens but not good at writing streamlined logic.
The number of times ai gives me a 800 line dif only to replace it with a 5 line dif after i read it and notice it grossly overcomplicated the ask and scoped in a bunch of nonsense from training data.
I'm beginning to abandon the IDE (vscode in my case). I've always been very comfortable with (or at least not scared of) the command line so the Claude app with a terminal pane open is handling much of my IDE use cases. What I really need to do is get better at using find, grep, and other search tools from the terminal and then create a good .vimrc for editing and i'm set. heh what's old is new again!
> I am inspecting every single line it changes.
Honestly, when I'm looking at ClaudeCode's output 75% of time i'm doing it to learn and understand and not just check for correctness. I'm confident enough to admit I don't know everything and I've learned a lot from reading Claude's code.
I had personal subscriptions to WebStorm and GoLand and cancelled them not long after getting Windsurf. Just don't need the IDE abilities like I used to... Still use 'go to definition' but that's pretty much it.
IMO what's being called an 'Agent Development Environment' solves this issue for you. I like Orca but there's a few dozen of them.
Basically they give you a way to view the code the llm has generated/changed easily, annotate that code for the llm, and manage multiple agents and at once.
And with LLMs you can just create your own pretty easily that matches your exact workflow and integrates with all your tools. I've gone through a few iterations, first using the Unix small tools that talk to each other philosophy, then a single TUI app running in a pane next to my agent cli and now a Go server that has a cli and web ui with xterm embedded terminals and has its own chat sidebar in the web ui that can use tools and interact with running sessions in terminals. I'll probably have something new in 6 months.
This has been integrated into intellin in the form of jetbrains air, so they may also decided that's the direction?
Can't seem to beat vscode in over-ssh editing. Using IDEA it requires ~2GB transfer (local download plus ssh transfer) which is quite significant.
> ...inspecting...
I got used to sublime merge to context-switch editing vs reviewing, staging changes line-by-line
Yes that is a real problem at work. A lot of stuff is done in containers or virtual devices and jetbrains remote developping workflow takes too much time due to this transfer. VsCode is much faster there.
I have completely stopped using Jetbrains products since 6 months ago. Like all, not gonna even renew my subscription.
Heavy user of WebStorm and Datagrip since at least 2019.
How is an LLM replacing Datagrip?
Junie's features are geared very much towards the more vibecoding side of things. Jetbrains even produced a vibecodin IDE.
I can go for a week or two without opening my IDE. Unheard of just a year ago.
Yes. Github draft PRs for giving inline feedback to agents, then going back to chat window with agents in Cursor, Claude, Codex, etc. to say 'review my comments and address them'.
Has anyone had a good experience with Junie, to share?
I've tried it, and it seemed fine, but not compelling enough to even spend the free usage I get with my All Products Pack.
I tried it in DataGrip on a messy database. It hallucinated about which tables and columns to use. Had better results using Claude in the terminal and having it give me the SQL to run.
I use it daily, but I'm also the AI consumer that is looking for something like a hammer and a saw (it's clear what their job are and they're doing their job fine). I'm absolutelty not looking for the next-gen-stuff, so I avoid Codex/Claude/...
Junie is boring, and that's perfect (for me).
I think Junie is comparable to something like Claude Code or Codex, but moving a little slower feature wise. It's perfectly adequate for developers who want to use AI but don't want to keep up with the bleeding edge of tooling.
It felt quite competitive about a year ago. But haven't tried it since, no idea how it has held up with the other advancing. What I liked was the tight integration with the IDE. I don't particularly like the way I work with Claude now, still wanting to check the changes, navigate code, ask questions, write some code myself etc. Feel claude mostly is for the "bigger" changes. Sometimes I just want to select some text and refactor it, or ask a stupid simple question without the "chat".
Worked fine as a free tool, but as long as AI companies are selling their slopware tokens below cost with subscriptions, it's not really that interesting in my opinion.
The Jetbrains integration is nice, but if you rely on the tool you're probably not going to use the IDE much anyway.
Not personally but Junie was what made the fellow developer I respect most in the world actually start taking notice of LLMs as something useful instead of bad.
I used it for a bit.
It is alright to get an LLM review on code I write myself, but getting extra tokens is expensive, and it was not clear if I could configure it to use one of the API keys I have from GLM, MiMo, etc.
I tried Air as well. It was alright, but I found it a bit more cumbersome to use then Pi. I tried configuring Pi to be accessed though ACP, but it felt like going through a hoop to have a worse experience. Then again, I am not someone that manages multiple agents in parallel, at most I have one agent implementing something in a different repository while I am doing my own things.
Air could maybe be useful for me if I could plug in the LLMs I actually use directly, it is too tied to ChatGPT, Claude, etc.
I enjoyed it a lot early on. In particular it didn’t have all the confusing and anxiety inducing options that other agents have to use more expensive or less expensive models, I liked the way it approached “plan mode” [1] and I didn’t feel like I had to stress it about token costs the way I do with the other models…. Jetbrains now gives me a choice of agents which I don’t like because having to think about it makes feel like one of those “ai bros” who is overthinking their relationship to ai and underthinking their code.
I would like to see one more ide-integrated, like I think running commands like ‘grep’ with the shell is really for the birds (creates a risk that some other command line might be run, the wrong files might be accessed, all that) and rather there should be a specialized toolbox.
[1] … I reject vibe coding. Token costs be damned but I always like to have a talk before it starts like “I think…, maybe you should…, does this make sense?, do you have any questions for me before you start?” and later “what are you doing in the code in the selection?”
Giving away tokens just reduces their revenue line, while increasing operational costs. Both these accounts look stable.
The anomaly is the cash flow of investing activities, which is not something you can put such activity as you have described under.
> They've invested in something big
Wonder what the "something big" could be that companies are throwing money into in 2026.
Yeah, mind blowing after reading some comments which wen to conclusions without thininkg...
Look at the report (or point your clankers at it), not the saased helgi-pay-me-for-more, but free, full at CZ corporate registry. few tidbits from my fast (error prone) readin:
- main reason of net income loss is currency movement in 2025(CZK vs USD). eg. if they hold USD, they report loss without money moving. The other was bigger costs (but look below)
- they have 6% rev growth but ONLY in this CZK entity, whole group is whooping 25% up
- investing was lending (to subsidiaries) and outflow to bank deposits (sic!)
- cost increase impacting operating profit was from:
Looks fine for me and definitely not ai-doom-scenario.not yet ;)
Why are investments considered losses? It always seemed unintuitive to me as a layman. You made the profit and it's free to use however you want... investing it is a loss?
Investment != loss.
IIRC investments are any transactions which increase the assets in the balance sheet. Losses are outflows net of inflows.
In abstract terms, one is about stock and the other about flow of spend.
> Why are investments considered losses?
Because traders are short-sighted and demand the profit line always goes up.
They're also horrifyingly risk-averse. A temporary dip in profit because money is being spent on expanding is a negative signal to them.
I regret someone convincing me not to buy TSMC stock about 5 years ago because of their high CapEx. I would have 5x'd my money since then.
For the same reason employee salary is considered a cost instead of profit. Anything that isn't going into the pockets of the business owners is loss.
I don't know the details of Czech accounting, but large investments are usually amortized over several years. It impacts cash-flow more than profit
If that 'costs' is 'tokens' well it might not possibly bode well as this would not be primaryly R&D
Assuming that by this you mean giving end-users tokens, you can't file giving tokens away under a cash flow of investing activities line.
Or more likely, they're burning cash trying to chase the AI train to no avail while their core product stagnates, which is definitely not a good thing.
Well, clinging on something that might be dying off also doesn't sound like a sound business strategy.
If AI continues to be improving then it's reasonable to assume most people won't need a full blown IDE.
Oh, they don't need a reason to let the core product stagnate. They've been doing that for years.
The war in Ukraine and subsequent move to Czechia did seem to hurt them pretty badly, but I wouldn't say they are stagnant. I've been a happy customer of PHPStorm for years and it continues to improve.
Move to Germany.
The company has always been registered in Prague, Czechia.
They just moved the development center from St. Peterburg, Russia to Munich, Germany.
I only use their DataGrip product. Compared to the competition they are iterating at lightspeed.
That's unfair. They released plenty of fresh performance regressions
Tbf their core product is at risk by everyone and their mom having an "AI IDE" product.
If your existing, well-established product is at risk due to new, competing products that do things in radically different ways, immediately dropping your product to chase the competition from way behind is usually not the right move. Unless you have a significant moat around your ecosystem, what reason do users have to adopt your inferior copy instead of the thing you copied?
I firmly believe JetBrains would have a better chance of survival if they stopped chasing the AI hype and got back to work on their IDEs, accepting the fact that they'll have less users than before. Right now, they're completely lost.
Isn’t it the Junie AI tool? I hope not, but that seems like the most likely possibility.
How many customers extended their yearly plan by 2+ years to lock in the old pricing?
I only kept the current sub because models are not quite there, but to be fair I haven't opened Rider for 6 months. VS community is faster and is sufficient to do a quick fix of agent written code in terminal cases.
Next year I am 95% certain I won't renew anymore.
> Something big
Probably AI spend and increased developer cost (salary + AI subscription cost). And the increase in memory prices means procuring IT assets has sky-rocketed too.
I would assume the margins they operated on, evaporated with the AI bubble.
Many organisms in an adversarial environment spend significant energy in their dying hours trying to survive
RustRover used to be my daily driver.
Now it's Claude Code and ever so occasionally Codex.
I never do work in IDEs by hand anymore. I stopped writing code entirely in February and I will likely never write code again unless my internet dies.
I need a JetBrains-level AST navigator that focuses on high level code navigation and understanding, and moreover on code and architectural review. I need to quickly scan diffs and quickly see architecture at a glance.
Of course even that too many eventually fall away.
I rarely open RustRover these days. I could never have predicted that.
Yeap, I just need VSCode to look through the code. Its good enough for read-only purposes.
Not sure who downvoted this. JetBrains IDEs are done for.
I don't even remember the last time I opened them, I cancelled my All Products pack this year.
The advantage it had over vscode was always the better language features and the familiar UI.
None of that is useful to me in AI based workflows. Some might still disagree, but the manual development workflow using an IDE is clearly dying.
JetBrain's revenue will obviously crater as a result, particularly when slower enterprise licenses follow.
I "code" using Codex but I still use PHPStorm for checking diffs, database access, reviewing PRs, and the debugger. The value proposition has changed, not disappeared.
> I "code" using Codex but I still use PHPStorm for checking diffs, database access, reviewing PRs, and the debugger. The value proposition has changed, not disappeared.
You are able to do this while the output is small enough. But, it will not stay small for long. Business expectations are rising fast. To stay competitive, you have to push large amounts of code/fixes/features. There is no way to manually review it or QA it. If your org is not there yet, it will eventually get there. Or it will die out. It is only a matter of time.
I always preferred to check MR diffs in GitLab.
And I don't use the debugger nowadays. The AI can do it much faster and add relevant instrumentation and parse logs.
> always preferred to check MR diffs in GitLab.
I'm on the opinion that if it's "code review" and code is not properly checked out than it's just a meat linter phase that's almost completely useless with meaningless style disagreements.
I'm wondering, do you check out MRs from forks in your IDE? What tooling do you use?
On the command line it seems a bit tedious with forks, and disk space constraints in our crappy enterprise environment are another factor.
I've been paying for the all products pack for 8 years now, but at my latest job all code is generated, and I think this will be the reality at most companies. I won't extend this year
Why do you think their revenue is up?
> Not sure who downvoted this.
If you've been on HN long enough you recognize that the OP is quite prolific in making absurd claims about AI: infamously predicted that children would be making professional, Hollywood level films by the end of 2025, and is now spending their time building the 5000th barely functional clone of Adobe tools[0]. It's probably a little unfair, but they are bold claims from someone who really does not have the ground to be making bold claims.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958850
This is like watching weekend car tinkerers argue with Ferrari mechanics about their tooling. "I'm never going to write code ever again."
It's important to realize that Wordpress still powers like 40% of the internet. It was more in the past.
Most "developers" were busy cranking out low-end software before AI.
They never worked on large, complex software systems or in professional engineering orgs.
Lots of these people never would have made the grade, would have been cut, or forever juniors. Many were probably bitter about this.
Well now comes along AI..
Only that it isn't, and that millions of professionals, including myself, use agentic AI successfully to implement high quality software.
That there is no lack of people delivering low quality using AI does not change this.
> millions of professionals, including myself,
> there is no lack of people delivering low quality using AI
I like how you self-associate. Do you really belong to the first group, or is that what you think you are.
there is also quite enough fields in which AI generated code is just not even allowed to touch the codebase to begin with.
There surely is code so critical that not fully understanding every line of it is not an option.
That's probably the rare exception.
Even in finance everyone is using AI.
You don't get the nuance that there are people who enjoy the writing the code part more than they enjoy the handholding and hitting enter on a prompt part. And they write it fast or concise enough to not need to prompt engineer bicker with a machine.
And as soon as an edge case pops up that your model will have never been able to hear about because it hasn't been released publicly, security vuln, whatever, you'll get a "fix" confidently hallucinated at you and be none the wiser.
There's going to be a huge pendulum swing with all the llm zombies and sanewashing it like this isn't helping anyone.
All of this just oozes junior engineer if you're even employed in the field at all.
I do get that some people enjoy the manual process more than they enjoy building the product.
It doesn't give you the right to insult my expertise, and frankly your arguments sound like things that one would make up despite little actual experience using AI to develop software.
How can one insult something one knows nothing about. Tell us what sort of expert are you instead of patting yourself on the back. Anybody can come here and claim they're bigger experts than you. Will you believe them? Maybe you're a big ego with rubbish "engineering" skills.
Hobbyists are more likely to use IDEs at this point; pros have to get work done.
please tell me what you work on so I can pre-emptively ban it
> Not sure who downvoted this.
Half of HN hates AI.
A large percentage thinks that the current status quo is how things will look over the next decade. They don't think everything is fundamentally and irreversibly changing.
Nobody is coming out of this with the same career. The whole world is being rewired. Some people really don't like that.
I'm just glad we're out of the web platform / cellphone incrementalism era. I wish more of my career could have been spent with this rocket fuel. It's dangerous and hypergolic, but it's fun and flashy and capable of pulling us out of this gravity well.
I use AI on a daily basis and I still found all of your takes in this thread to be silly hyperbole.
It's kinda cute that you think you're the prophet of AI spreading wisdom
I use https://github.com/DetachHead/rebased, which is based on IntelliJ, for review. The maintainer is responsive.
> Is no one looking at the revenue line? Revenue still trending the same.
Yes. Companies have been looking at nothing but revenue for over 10 years now. You realize that a sustainable company has to look at net profit at some point?
probably ai related
A bit tongue-in-cheek but I'm amazed by people that don't open an IDE or look at code. Are you paid to press enter at anything that Claude present to you?
Personally I usually use Claude inside the Jetbrain's IDE terminal, even if I code by hand obviously less. I still like using the diff, navigation, quick access to any file path for my prompt etc but maybe that won't last.
(edit: although I currently use an old perpetual fallback license because I didn't like the last price increase especially as they slowly remove what I like in the UI)
You will be surprised by how many professional software engineers don't read their code or care these days.
I have seen a bubble sort function in a PR from an engineer with 10 years of experience. Meanwhile sort from standard library is easily available with one single line.
The bar has become as low as "it works" without considering what's in the code or whether the entire feature should even exist at all.
P.S. that same engineer sent out a PR of 200-file feature. The PR is so large that it freezes the latest MacBook Pro if you try to read it. Nobody reviewed it and he merged it himself. Nobody uses that feature, and nobody in the teams wants to maintain it. Now we are considering scrapping it.
The thing is: people quickly discover that even mediocre LLM-code with a mediocre LLM-review, is still better quality than what they hand wrote and hand-reviewed.
So it's already an improvement. Should it be manually read, comprehended, reviewed? Probably. But they can get to an improvement over what they did 2 years ago, with basically no effort. And then they can get a little bit further, with massive effort?
The "LLM-yolo" is a big knee in the cost/benefit curve. It's an improvement over their "old code". The only drawback is: it's still containing bugs, and now no one understands them. But that's not hitting them until that code has aged somewhat, so a year or two down the line.
> The thing is: people quickly discover that even mediocre LLM-code with a mediocre LLM-review, is still better quality than what they hand wrote and hand-reviewed.
If mediocre code is better quality than what you wrote by hand, you've quickly discovered that you're incompetent.
> If mediocre code is better quality than what you wrote by hand
Most code I have seen and reviewed over my 25+ year programmer life has been no worse than mediocre LLM code.
It's not a massive sample, but to me it suggests, most code programmers write, is somewhere between bad and mediocre.
And here's the appeal of the models: if what you used to produced was bad-to-mediocre, and you can now do slightly better for much cheaper, that's a huge win.
> And here's the appeal of the models: if what you used to produced was bad-to-mediocre, and you can now do slightly better for much cheaper, that's a huge win.
And the guy you were responding to is seeing people produce worse code with LLMs (e.g. senior engineers pushing non-library bubble sort implementations, like they're in a high school programming class).
And if you're somehow right, it's not a "huge win" for you. It's a sign you're personally providing little value to the business, and sooner or later you'll need to find a new career.
What I'm saying is the quiet part out loud: A majority of coders and a majority of really IS bad. And now a lot of that code is actually better (big win).
Basically: the code was so bad before, that un-reviewed LLM-code is now better than the average contribution. That means, that at least short term, the vibe coding can increase quality.
The problem is that it also increases code volume (bad) and rapidly decreases understanding (even worse).
Yeah I've been experimenting with a bunch of different domains: 2D CAD, PCB design, coding obviously and recently I had Claude finish a project on all three fronts: finish the firmware(in rust because why not), change up a few components and finalise the pcb design, source all the non pcb components and do all the documentation for the installer. To be fair, it had a solid base to build from, but still, almost everything was "good enough", now I'm at work looking at PCB design that take the electrical engineers 8 weeks when I know I could have had two prototypes shipped and tested already. The fact is 90% of people are not doing the really hard stuff and Claude can just brute force pretty much any low to mid tier white collar task given enough information.
Code volume and understanding can be tackled with a proper system prompt. Even afterwards, apart from costing resources, a cross-model optimization can increase quality of the output. Unix philosophy in the system prompt could be useful if the code wants to be worked on later again.
> Unix philosophy in the system prompt could be useful if the code wants to be worked on later again
There is no system prompt that can prevent this. If all you needed was some kind of rather short instruction we'd already have that baked into harnesses a long time ago. The problem is not that agents do not have the right instructions, they theoretically have everything there is to know about software architecture already in their training data.
They do have "everything" but that's too much, I think. They need to have direct instruction that is in the context, that is appropriate for the project and codebase at hand. In the whole universe of training data, there's every approach imaginable. What's needed is enough guidance to identify the right approach consistently.
I recognize that crafting a 'perfect' prompt is impossible, but neither is writing the perfect code, or even the 'perfect' code style guide. But it is 100% the kind of problem that can be iteratively improved to a point where it's much better than what you get by one-shotting everything without much consideration of these details.
I myself am maybe 5% sophisticated if 0 is I just discovered LLMs today, and 100 is the most skilled at using AI the world has seen. What I've learned so far is that I have a lot of room to improve.
Which is why I am actually not completely worried about the careers of current software engineers: If you brought in a bunch of non-engineers to prompt Claude to build and maintain an ERP system, or a social networking site, or an ad exchange, or even Shopify clone, I don't see those products being competitive with ones where engineers armed with the same LLMs are building them.
> They need to have direct instruction that is in the context, that is appropriate for the project and codebase at hand
> I recognize that crafting a 'perfect' prompt is impossible, but neither is writing the perfect code, or even the 'perfect' code style guide
This is not about "perfect code" or style guides. For code styles we have linters, that does not require any instructions. I'm talking about software architecture for large complex web applications that dozens of people (that also change frequently) contribute to and that is spread across many different repos/services and an environment with constantly changing business requirements.
The terms that are relevant here are: coupling, cohesion, vertical slices, module boundaries and so on. This is software architecture and coding agents are terrible at this and there is no prompt and no instruction fixes this that could reasonably fit into a context window. I don't even think that coding agents fail because the lack the instructions and therefore adding instructions won't fix these failure modes.
Sturgeon's law hits again.
"Ninety percent of everything is crap"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
> What I'm saying is the quiet part out loud: A majority of coders and a majority of really IS bad....
How would you know "the majority" from your anecdotes? Maybe you just spent your career working with incompetent people who didn't care.
And actually there's a point I forgot to address earlier, in my first comment:
>>>>> The thing is: people quickly discover that even mediocre LLM-code with a mediocre LLM-review, is still better quality than what they hand wrote and hand-reviewed.
People whose hand-written code is worse than "mediocre LLM-code with a mediocre LLM-review" are not going to discover the LLM-code is better, because they typically don't care. That's usually the whole problem with that kind of person.
> ...And now a lot of that code is actually better (big win).
> Basically: the code was so bad before, that un-reviewed LLM-code is now better than the average contribution. That means, that at least short term, the vibe coding can increase quality.
> The problem is that it also increases code volume (bad) and rapidly decreases understanding (even worse).
You're contradicting yourself here. Even accepting your statements uncritically, it doesn't sound like a "big win." It sounds like a marginal improvement that's ultimately self-defeating.
Surprise, most coders are actually incompetent. LLMs therefore do write better than most.
The problem with hand review I always had was trying to teach the other person. You don't want to present them with an avalanche of problems. So you pick the most important 5. Over time this iterates and you build someone good at what they do.
The good part of LLMs is you don't have to worry about overloading them: you can just outline every problem with the code they produce.
The bad part of LLMs is they don't really "get better" at this stuff. I'm not training a human, and there's a limited amount LLMs can learn. So the training phase never really ends - it's Eternal September.
There's also the problem of this ultimately being my code. It isn't Claude's - Claude isn't a person.
I still read the code. I use LLMs to review it. But I also review it myself. Ultimately its faster than before, and probably better quality (because I can just give all the problems to the LLM), but slower than people doing zero review.
> The bad part of LLMs is they don't really "get better" at this stuff. I'm not training a human, and there's a limited amount LLMs can learn. So the training phase never really ends - it's Eternal September.
After I give feedback to the AI I then ask it if we learned something and then I ask it to store that guidance in a relevant skill file.
I have skill files for everything and anything in my project. Three just for testing - one for frontend, backend, and e2e. I have one just for frontend forms. I have one for project terms, which I ask it to read before doing anything, so it keeps the terms in the project right. I have one for doing db migrations and one for doing backend routes. I have many tens of skills that have been slowly built up like this.
> The thing is: people quickly discover that even mediocre LLM-code with a mediocre LLM-review, is still better quality than what they hand wrote and hand-reviewed.
Emphasis mine.
I can't phantom some that bad at coding. Using such exaggeration void your comment.
> The thing is: people quickly discover that even mediocre LLM-code with a mediocre LLM-review, is still better quality than what they hand wrote and hand-reviewed.
No, I find that most teams I've been on have 5% to 20% of their most artisan engineers actually giving a shit about the code, and gently coaching the other 95% to 80% of the engineers who are usually much more junior during code review to not push unmaintainable slop. If you're on a team that doesn't still have someone giving a shit, it's not a sign that there are no teams that don't give a shit, it's that you're on a shit team.
There are also teams where the incentive is to get to pull request (or merge request) as soon as possible, so that you can move the ticket across the board and relieve downward pressure. That usually means pushing subpar code to PR that you know you'll spend another few hours fixing. EDIT: I bring this up because this can bias one's belief that humans produce poor quality code, when you're usually looking at the first draft that was incentivized to be pushed out "too early".
Anyway, if you're on a shit team, but you're still satisfying product and nothing is blowing up yet, there's a pretty good sign that your software has no moat and will be the first to be replaced by LLM-generated software on-demand. This is probably where most niche B2B back-office, front-office software sits. Stuff that sits somewhere in the realm of "We could probably do this in Excel if we wanted to."
> The thing is: people quickly discover that even mediocre LLM-code with a mediocre LLM-review, is still better quality than what they hand wrote and hand-reviewed.
Not my experience at all. Mediocre LLM-code, mediocrely reviewed is a loaded footgun aimed at both your feet.
even mediocre LLM-code with a mediocre LLM-review, is still better quality than what they hand wrote and hand-reviewed
That is only true for bad coders, that in a prior era would have been known as script kiddies.
Ai separates the wheat from the chaff
It’s so easy to generate a pile of crap now that it “just works” as you say.
Quality, maintainability, simplicity, understandability, flexibility etc all still matter at $DAY_JOB, where you’ve got paying customers. We’ve got a responsibility to write good software that adds to people’s lives.
I’d recommend to try to raise the bar. Commit messages written by humans, no PRs above a certain size, any PR needs an introduction / explanation by author first for the reviewers.
I refuse to believe an LLM implemented bubble sort without being prompted.
You're in for a surprise when LLM nukes your entire drive without being prompted.
Isn't that the downside of YOLO mode?
The issue here is that LLMs sometimes "make a mistake" and issue a command like that in the first place, as seen in the wild
This kind of thing is awful if this is how engineering is going for user-facing apps, but disastrous if this is how it's going for infrastructure and libraries.
"professional software engineers don't read their code or care these days"
The word professional im important here. I don't want to know, how unprofessional devs handle their craft.
> Now we are considering scrapping it
Turns out, it was probably good that nobody spent time reviewing it.
You should consider scrapping him also.
Had AI do some work parsing markdown with the leading library for it.
Follow up work to generate markdown? It wrote a mess of manual string building instead of using said library lol. Even with strong AGENTS.md guidance around using existing and leading community libraries they will often take a hard left and write stdlib straight into your repo.
Y'all should scrap that feature and maybe the engineer. I believe the Shopify CEO recently referred to those types of PR as "slop grenades" that cause headaches for everyone else..
This is not overly surprising to me, the last decade or so has seen the industry become a "good job that pays well" and many people got into not for the love and craft, but for the money
I dont think it has as much to do with that as it does rising expectations from leadership to just ship MORE.
MORE MORE MORE like AI has given executives an excuse to ratchet up performance expectations by at least 3x (as in my company) up to 10x for certain start ups I've heard.
There's literally not enough time for a human to do all the activities around quality they were doing even a year ago.
It's interesting your complaints are similar to mine about TDD. I've dealt with so many engineers that assume that coverage and passing tests is the bar.
Why did the clanker add a bubble sort implementation instead of using the stdlib sort?
Most engineers aren’t really idiots.
When you get paid to care, you will care. Unfortunately, no one cares, they just want results, any result. Bubble sort will do, especially for low volume tasks.
Use the time you save by not caring, to do other fun stuff.
> Use the time you save by not caring, to do other fun stuff.
That's not an option for people who "care". Like it or not, a lot of self is tied up in work. Feeling useless rots you from within.
> Use the time you save by not caring, to do other fun stuff
What kind of time do you save, especially at work? At any normal software shop you have an endless list of things to do. And most often you don't get to choose the "fun" part.
I used to use Claude inside of a terminal within Webstorm until I realized I rarely looked at the code in the IDE. Instead I was creating draft PRs and reviewing the code in github. Now I use claude inside of herdr, and I appreciate having more screen real estate devoted to claude. As a long-time Jetbrains subscriber it pains me to stop using it. But at this point, I'm not sure what they could come up with that would be compelling enough for me to switch back.
Their coding agent "Junie" is actually really good. The problem is they force you through only a few curated models. And try to funnel you through them to subscribe to do it, too. It's not like Pi or opencode that lets you just point at an OpenAI API endpoint and then choose whatever model. If I recall you can even actually use local models, or openrouter etc, but only use the specific model variants from their curated list. It's insane. They tried to stick themselves in the middle, and failed. Nobody will use it.
They've also done so many pivots on AI, all of them weakly and annoyingly done. They couldn't even pull of FiTM copilot well, they were super late on it and it had all sort of bugs.
They could have just taken the loss and written an amazing GUI coding agent that integrated well with their IDE -- amazing integrations with their refactorings, etc. -- but that played well in other people's ecosystems but they refused and tried to own the whole pipe. Or something. They just confused me.
Their latest attempt is to allow you to connect to and run other people's agent harnesses inside the IDE and it works well enough but it wasn't enough to grab me since I (like you) use herdr on another machine to do the coding.
I've been using their products since ~IDEA 3.x. Almost my entire 25+ year career really. My fingers are wedded to their keystrokes.
JetBrains face a unique problem: they are a real business that can't just raise infinity money from SoftBank or request government bailouts because the sheer size of their debts imperils the financial system. So they have to do things that might seem annoying or overly pushy versus their competitors.
For their entire existence people have complained about JetBrains this way because they always face some competitor that isn't making money and isn't even trying. Eventually those competitors go down, but a new one instantly arises. People just really love losing money on developer tools.
Wanting to charge money for an AI service is a clearly sensible business move. If their competitors weren't shredding the world's entire supply of investable capital as quickly as possible, this would be a good strategy. Alas.
You can actually configure the ide with any open ai compatible endpoint, I use llma and it lists all the models that I have currently installed, works well. Or am I missing your point?
Junie in particular, or just their various other "AI Assistant" / "Chat" things? They have multiple confusing overlapping products/modes going on. "JetBrains AI" -- which may or may not be same as "Junie"?, "AI Chat", then there's the "Agents" tab which integrates outside coding agents.
AI Assistant > Providers & API Key There is an option Third Party AI Provider, where you can select OpenAI compatible, and then you can customize where (core, instant helper, inline etc) do you want to use third party, where JetBrains.
I guess they iterated quite a few products to "not get behind" and see what sticks.
Most recently they integrated air, which is basically an "agent management/orchestrator" where you can run any ACP-compatible agent with any model you want and it's just the single place where you manage them, see their progress, steer them, merge their results etc.
>Are you paid to press enter at anything that Claude present to you?
I'm paid to create a product. If Claude does so without me having to look at the code, then that's what I'm being paid to do.
You could be implicitly paid to understand what you're delivering and reading code could be a way to achieve that.
I think you're paid to deliver. Lots of developers for decades have delivered crap that looks good on the surface and is otherwise unmaintainable. Now we're reaching the point where "everyone can code" and review queues are getting too long, with the result of many PRs being yoloed.
This of course varies by company but this is clearly where it's headed: bot pushes, bot reviews, you look at the PR title and click merge.
But then it's really Claude that is creating the product. What is your part?
Can the CEO tell claude to build the app? No. Then engineers are needed
Frankly, this all just sounds like that scene from Office Space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4OvQIGDg4I
> What would you say... ya do here?
The engineering? SDLC is much bigger than typing code.
To fix it later :)
We hire people to get quality products.
That would mean the software before LLMs were quality products, which is laughable.
No, it means that when I want a product, I do demand quality. Your entailment is outside logic.
Your laughter is noted - but we have ever laughed about it.
> I'm paid to [build a bridge]. If Claude does so without me having to [understand the math], then that's what I'm being paid to do.
I switched to vscode because the complexity and runtime overhead of intellij were no longer justified with Claude writing most of the code. I work on a big java code base and every two days I had to wrangle with intellij cache, clearing it or what not. With Claude I'm working in multiple work trees at the same time and this just amplifies every issue intellij had with slow indexing and broken caches. And TBH nowadays I eyeball the code more than read, so a basic code editor with navigation seems enough
I just look at my own diffs in a draft GHE PR and iterate with my agent on Github. This is often a much better UX than trying to make sure every single linter or thing is consistent between my machine and the CI machine. We do use Docker but it's still just easier to do it all on the CI box / Github.
The quickest sign I have right now to find if the developer/team don't read their code is looking at their recently AI-generated test cases. Often, coding agents go too verbose in their tests and they are most often overlooked even during normal reviews. If there are verbose tests, like declaring a constant and asserting it's value, you know that the code isn't being read much.
Using a CLI coding agent in your IDE's terminal is a terrible way to view conversation history and works poorly for organizing multiple conversations.
It only fits a hands-on, merely AI-assisted development approach, on one feature at a time, that is not typically productive compared to agentic development.
You might disagree, but you'll find that the proponents of the hands-on approach are losing ground every month as AI gets better at working autonomously.
Agentic development is basically a scam IMO. I’ve written about this before, but collaborative coding with AI is a huge productivity boost and you can still own all the quality. Ultimately with agentic development there’s too much you can’t, and won’t, review. The quality slips out of your hands.
I still read all the code AI produces, and I have a specific workflow. I scaffold the API first using AI, then review it for quality. Then I write tests, and review them for quality. Implementation is last, and technically I need not review the code but I choose to.
When I’ve done agentic development, the only thing I’ve accomplished is 100x more token burn with lower-quality code. It’s also not faster, because the tokens cost time and so many mistakes are made that must be cleaned up. The agents burn so much time going around in circles, when I could’ve just steered the model to write a good implementation.
Keep in mind, this is very fast. Models still produce thousands of lines of code in mere minutes. And with tests backing them up and an API frozen, the model goes much faster as it can iterate and has a framework for what it’s doing.
I'm expecting IDEs to adapt to new workflows, albeit very slowly.
There is potential to build a better UI than what's constrained within a CLI's grid of characters.
I'll admit I'm currently not up to speed on having multiple features worked at the same time, with git worktrees etc.
Except surrendering cognitive control over the system being built makes things worse.
Claude constantly makes poor architectural decisions, adds unnecessary and costly checks, makes wrong assumptions, etc.
Doesn't take the value out of LLMs writing code, but they need to be properly steered and reasoned with. How will you do so if you don't even browse the code it generates.
I always suspect that the people all in fully agentic codig like this are mostly creating prototypes, half-assed copies of existing products, etc.
I am glad to not work in such an environment.
You'd be wrong, I'm working on a paid mobile app, with the express goal of delivering a better product than existing competitors.
I've put like 500 hours of work into it over the last 6 months, besides my full-time software engineering job.
Frankly I think I have more experience than most here at using AI.
For me it works very well to just have a conversation with the agent in order to understand issues and steer it.
Essentially I would ask the question I would otherwise try to answer by reading the code.
Obviously, this has the downside that sometimes you miss things that would be obvious when reading and understanding all the code.
Since that can take a lot of time, it is still more efficient for me to instead QA test functionality and address issues I notice during actual use.
> I'm working on a paid mobile app
This doesn't say much. Plenty mobile apps, even paid ones, are of shovelware quality. And even if that's not the case, it's typically something very self-contained and of relatively low complexity.
On my personal projects I also seldom need to review code very thoroughly. But it's also not super complex stuff.
At my workplace things are not like that. It's a very complex system on a highly regulated environment. Opus 5.5 constantly get things wrong in ways that are simply not acceptable.
And I am not even an AI naysayer. I accept it as another development tool.
My app is relatively self-contained.
Complexity is up for debate. The project currently has ~1500 en translations and 7 AI models I optimized for mobile.
I think the key point is being self-contained, so that QA testing is effective for catching issues.
> I'm working on a paid mobile app, with the express goal of delivering a better product than existing competitors.
If that's your goal, stop using the slop machine. You will never make something actually good if you are letting it drive.
What do you expect when management pressures engineers to tokenmaxx? This is a product of their doing.
My IDE is the MR diff.
Since the spring, I haven't actually needed to write the code, just look at it and make sure it's good.
All that I do from inside GitHub or GitLab.
I've had a JetBrains subscription forever and this is the first time I'm considering not renewing it.
> and make sure it's good. All that I do from inside GitHub or GitLab.
So presumably your workflow is, agent tui -> push -> review -> find problems -> agent tui -> push?
Care to share any code or features that have come of your workflow? I'm skeptical of the quality and complexity this approach can handle.
JetBrains still has best tooling for previewing changes, resolving conflicts, git integration. I get that vibe coders not necessarily need all that but it's the best class tooling money can buy.
They should look into selling a standalone git conflict resolution app. Though for my money, nothing beats Fork if you're on a Mac: https://fork.dev (just wish it supported jujutsu)
Personally I don't use CLI anymore, Codex app is very good and it starts to look like how IDEs will be in the future. You can review code in a GitHub style diff and leave inline comments (super useful), have multiple agents work in parallel with or without worktrees, plus there is very good code navigation (especially if you ask followup clarification questions that will link to other parts of code).
I keep lazygit open next to each Claude/Codex session that's working on a change, but over time scrolling the changes has gone from necessary to just out of curiosity.
At this point of 2026, if you're reading code and still catching things, then the problem was before the code was written. You should have decided more high level preferences like invariants before the work began.
And this is a good thing.
I was at a product developer conference a few weeks ago (will keep the company name private for now), and the speaker asked the room, How many of you are "still" using an IDE to create your applications, implying that if you are using an IDE, you are a dinosaur. I don't believe that but some company leaders are thinking it.
Related, it amazes me how many seasoned developers don't know how to do basic tasks in their editor/IDE with the keyboard and instead rely on their mouse. Most people don't need to be super users, but it baffles me when I see a developer who hasn't at least learned the keyboard shortcuts for opening files and jumping to functions/methods, etc.
I’m only a mild keyboard user in IDEs, but I think I’d go mad if the keyboard shortcuts for quick open, jump to line, jump to function, etc suddenly disappeared.
More baffling, my muscle memory knows the keyboard shortcuts, but I don't.
I’m sure there are people who aren’t looking at the code at all. But for those that are I guess I’m wondering why bother with an IDE anymore? I’m finding I can just review everything I need to with a text editor like Neovim now. Even GitHub review is probably good enough for people.
I am mostly happy with Neovim with an LSP integration. I'm not going to say it's "lighter" or anything because rust-analyzer isn't exactly "small", but it is a simpler, and IMO "cleaner" interface. Also completely free.
I do look at the code and have to correct Claude most of the time, but I've noticed that with AI-assisted coding, I mostly look at the diffs when i'm inside IntelliJ. I don't need a pricey full-fledged IDE to just look at files and their diffs.
you think these guys press enter?
You don't need JetBrains IDE for that... Free VS Code would pop up in a second.
I'm slowly accepting that this is the new reality.
I've spent 1 month between august and early september writing some of the best code of my life. LLMs only provided feedback, I wrote all the code manually, still remember it by heart.
I was very delighted by the many architectural iterations that led to it. 9 files, around 10k lines of code (of those, 7k tests).
By the end of super funny exercise I kinda realized that if I had the same feature vibe coded it would've been better. I would've done much more and progressed more feature wise.
I just feel stupid hand writing my code.
It doesn't help that I work with stellar individual contributors. All of my team mates (except a junior) are either all former faang or contributed to projects we all use (from the TypeScript compiler to Linux). And they are all abandoning if not spearheading the abandonment of reading code. I'm talking people that truly loved the technical aspect of it and excelled in it.
I just feel stupid, like I'm carrying a weight that I should abandon.
Comments like yours feel would've made sense 6 months ago, but now are crumbling.
Software is essentially so cheap and throwaway nowadays that letting LLMs write it is imperative. When you find your use cases you start reviewing it or rewriting it thoroughly.
There’s a middle ground.
I’ve been using agents to do the code for me, but I explicitly tells it to iterate in small changes that I can review and approve as it happens, not after a 2k lines diff. It makes me understand what’s being made, and test every little change before we move on to change other parts of the code. Also helps you correct any misunderstanding right from the start.
To me this feels the worst of both worlds.
this is the way
When you give a ticket to a jr developer, do you look over their shoulder the entire time they write the code? Or do pause to answer questions, give feedback on how to go about a task, and review their results?
> I'm amazed by people that don't open an IDE or look at code
Oh, boy, here we go... Sighs and pulls up a chair.
Using an IDE has nothing to do with looking at code. The best engineers I've ever known use what JetBrains aficionados would refer to as "editors", not full-blown IDEs. To a person, not one of them felt as though they were missing anything they wanted or needed. I would probably even say "Unix is my IDE". I have a terminal chock-full of advanced command line tools to search and manipulate codebases. It's always fun and convenient when a GUI gives easy access to those things, but it's just that: a convenience, and only when the GUI exposes the full option set of the underlying tool, which they almost never do. Basically, I can alt-tab to a terminal, press up-arrow to expose "cargo build", and hit enter to run it, about as easily as someone else can select the build menu in an IDE. Further, if that build menu option is any less configurable than Cargo.toml, I'd prefer the text config any day. And finally, "cargo build" works with any editor I'm using that day, even if they don't their own build system wrappers.
IDEs are fine for people who enjoy them. I grind my teeth whenever anyone hints that they're remotely necessary for, well, anything, or that people who aren't using them are somehow missing out on something. We know what we're missing, and frankly, we're not missing it.
> Are you paid to press enter at anything that Claude present to you?
I mean, sometimes work falls exactly at the tool's strongest suit/match.
I am trying to think of what a comparison here could be but, for example, I remember early days in my career where pretty much 80% of the work was writing boilerplate and using scaffolding/generator tools, plugging them in the various plumbing and pipes of the stack, and just ticking boxes through Jira
Lots of "CRUD" and/or similar "recipe" type of work that was really just turning your brain off and needed that grunt labour force
You may ask: why is the person even needed?
My answer is the same as before: I don't know, I didn't know why were they needed back them either, felt like all could be automated as well, maybe the cost to invest in automating and mapping that all out was never a priority and the ROI math was "good enough" for the business while leadership had other north stars they were worried about?
Why not use ACP?
terminal and vim work completely fine
Actually I really only need bare vim now. It's really refreshing. I can view, navigate, diff etc without any fancy plugins. I can add comments where I want the agent to change something.
I've found that reviewing generated code, leaving comments, and asking Claude to address my comments is usually enough. When it isn't, a common editor is usually sufficient, and an IDE takes too long to start for the very small change I want to make.
If you need to review every edit that claude wants to make what's the point in using it? We're now treating it basically like a junior dev. Do our best to make sure that it's on the right path (leaning hard on the superpowers plugin) then let it work and look at the result. Though even that review is heavily AI assisted now. Our leadership has mandated that everything that can be done by AI, should be done by AI. We've only been in that mode for a couple of months but I'm starting to think that it's plausible with proper human steering and oversight.
This must be why every Google app now freezes for 3 or 4 seconds on iOS when you launch them.
I'm not being flippant. If I need to sit and watch a claude session reviewing every edit it makes, that's slower than me coding the changes by hand. Either it's good enough to work independently or it's not worth using. I have no idea how Google is using AI, but from what I've seen at my own company I do know that using AI effectively _and_ setting up repos/projects for good AI usage (and with guardrails to keep AI in check) are both acquired skills. Skills that the majority of devs don't have right now.
Can you share more about the guardrails you have to keep AI in check?
This repo I started yesterday has most of the patterns I like to use: https://github.com/mbcrawfo/SqlSource
Really the single biggest piece I use today is using a tool like superpowers to ensure your task is well defined. Added bonuses are its TDD implementation skills and multiple review steps baked into the workflow. Before I discovered superpowers I was manually telling claude to do these workflows, the plugin makes it easy.
In the repo itself:
* Keep agents.md focused; claude likes to really bloat it by default. The "Adding guidance for AI agents" rules go into every project and have worked pretty well.
* Aggressively use nested agents.md files. Focused rules located where they're relevant seem to do much better than having a large whole-project rule dump in the root agents.md.
* Recently I've started using the tech debt and deferred work documentation rules. Claude frequently decides on its own that some piece of functionality or issue is "deferred until later" or "out of scope". These rules help make it clear so that you can make it fix the item or at least have it documented for a followup session.
* Have it test all the things. Most of my personal projects with claude have about a 3:1 ratio of test:application code and high coverage. Claude make it easy to build test harnesses for things that most of us wouldn't have bothered with 5 years ago.
* Strict type checking, linting, static analysis, warnings as errors, etc. Anything you can turn on or add to block questionable code, do it.
* Use a claude pre-tool hook to run all of your checks before you allow a git commit command. Left on its own it can and will decide that it has a valid reason to bypass git commit hooks (husky) to commit broken code or tests.
I'm paid to produce software that has features and works.
Nobody cares how I get there or how ugly the code is. They care how fast I can do it and how reliable the software is.
I look at code sometimes, in down time, to see what's been done terribly by AI, and to fix it and hopefully fix the process so that things don't get done terribly in that particular way in the future.
It's not about "how ugly the code is". Poor solutions heaped on top of poor solutions can result in a system with real users and intractable issues. I'm all for AI, but not reviewing the code seems likely to cause issues long term.
Well, I used to pay more attention to the code, and then I found that if I spent more tokens having the AI review its work than actually creating new features, I was able to get more, better work done.
The AI review stage is where I've found prompting matters a lot more than that initial prototyping phase. I've iterated on prompts and tooling that help the AI keep the codebase clean-ish.
> Well, I used to pay more attention to the code, and then I found that if I spent more tokens having the AI review its work than actually creating new features, I was able to get more, better work done.
Of course it did. Because reviewing code thoroughly is harder than writing it.
Writing only consists of "making sure it does the task", reviewer have to understand code first, check if it does the task, then check whether it doesn't affect something else negatively (and it can be meta things like "doesn't adhere to project style", even if technical side is correct)
> Of course it did. Because reviewing code thoroughly is harder than writing it.
If there's one thing that I learned from AI proponents is that they don't value correctness. They only want to write more code every day. Which actually baffles me, because for a given feature set, there should be a Definition of Done, and the only work left should be slight alterations for oversight and dependency updates.
> they don't value correctness
I spend ~10-20 tokens on correctness and codebase cleanliness for every 1 I spend on new features.
How do you measure that? And how do you know it's effective, or that it's even working, if you're not reviewing the results?
> How do you measure that?
Vibes.
Reviews take way more time than new features, and often utilize 3 subagents at a time - it's not uncommon to have reviews take 3 hours when the feature only took 15 minutes. The numbers here are just estimates, though - I don't keep track. "10x to 20x tokens on review" is probably underestimating review cost, if anything.
I don't review all code myself, but I do spend down-time reading code. When I find obviously bad code/patterns/whatever, I don't just fix it directly - I work to create automated tests (like static analysis, almost) or adjust or create prompts and tools for agents (either for review stage or initial implementation) to solve that class of issue, instead of just that instance of it.
I never review the first iteration. I review it after the agents have already poured a ton of time into it, if ever.
I do sometimes watch agents work, and redirect them if I see them doing something dumb. But, usually, I have 5+ agents running, not counting sub-agents, and I'm just messing with the apps myself to find the next feature to create or polish.
Whats your YOE, like when did you enter tech as a SWE?
This shouldn't be normalized for you yet unless you're at a faang pushing this at the edge and new to the field, cause this isn't what we used to do 2 years ago.
If you're happy with the ai slop $$$ job more power to you but that isn't the entire field and there used to be (and hopefully still are) good and fun engineering jobs.
Contrary to popular normie belief, no not everyone wants to work at the Metas and OpenAIs and for good reason.
edit: Guys a literal business owner writing code for his own business, christ, what a waste of my time. So instead of hiring actual engineers you try to make it sound like you're employed as a software engineer and your experience is remotely normal. You are the literal business owner not filling seats because you're using AI.
"I'm paid to just shut up and code, baby!"
Yeah, that isn't a real SWE job, bud, don't make comments like you're in the trenches.
YOE is ~30, from my first PHP app to present. I've spent somewhere between 5 and 80 hours a week coding for the past 30 years, mostly self-employed, writing tools and creating custom CNC machines/robots for my own business, but more recently doing same thing for a company as a full time employee.
I still get to do some coding, where there are safety-critical production systems, but the work is mostly tooling that gets us to that point or supports the business otherwise.
It's an awesome job. Couldn't be funner, pretty much, except on data collection days. I get high level tasks, or come up with my own, and find or build solutions - no more running a whole business, doing production, keeping books, shipping orders, doing customer support - I only do the stuff I like.
we use a better editor
Even the creator of ruby on rails doesn't read code anymore, DHH.
Oh, I bet he doesn't. I wouldn't touch anything he's working on even with a mile-long pole.
Why's that? Ruby on Rails is a fantastic framework. My point was that if somebody who has done the work before AI agents is now following the footsteps of not reading code, then why are we still telling people that it's still useful to read code?
IDEA-based IDEs are not the only editors in the world, buddy.
> Are you paid to press enter at anything that Claude present to you?
And seen that JetBrains revenues still grew 6% YOY, it looks like after all there are still developers paying for an IDE.
I thought that by now, according to the AI kool-aid drinkers, there wouldn't be any developer anymore?
Wow, this really sucks. With all the money flocking to companies that trained LLMs on stolen data, we may lose the only set of IDEs that offer high quality professional development tools
I'm surprised that the word "only" still applies. I have my laments about JB (PyCharm / RR): Mainly centered around performance. Yet it has no competition! Whenever I read about VsCode, or Zed as alternatives, I feel disbelief, as they're not in the same league.
Zed in particular, from the way it was described upon release, sounded like it should have been a JB competitor. Reality: It can't even move functions or structs!
I love JetBrains. For many years I was a happy subscriber to the All Products Pack, paid for out of my own pocket. I would have said that you'd have to pry my JetBrains from my cold, dead hands.
A year or two ago, I finally gave up:
1. The IDE was simply too slow - notably slower and "heavier" than VS Code in particular - and it seemed to regularly get slower.
2. Bugs - from the complex (TypeScript constructs that tsc itself handles just fine while WebStorm's code analysis kept throwing false positives on) to the trivial and silly (failing to properly handle the <col> tag in React), and often staying open for years.
Meanwhile, VS Code just kept getting better, addressing the complaints I had with it while staying fast.
I work almost exclusively in TypeScript these days; as other commenters pointed out, I'm sure that JetBrains products are still great for other languages.
And their refactoring tools remain second to none. I'm profoundly disappointed in our industry that the VS Code developers apparently looked at JetBrains, with its arsenal of expertly crafted, deterministic, testable refactorings, and said, "Nope, we'd rather make everyone use inherently random language models for anything more complex than Rename Symbol."
They have made a fair bit of improvements, as performance was a big complaint. It's still not perfect, but VSCode also isn't nearly as powerful in my experience and needs a million plugins to match basic features.
I also gave up, after 10+ years of paying for it and even developing custom plugins.
The remote dev story is bad, it won't play nice with Nix environments, and high DPI support on Linux kept breaking on every other update.
I still miss the Git client sometimes, but Jujutsu has filled the gap.
I think you are going to get a lot of pushback from people using e.g. typescript, for which VS Code is pretty good.
For languages like kotlin, java and even python JB is still way ahead of the competition.
Reading Jetbrains' EULA makes me think it would be an easier read if they just listed the entities they would NOT share your data with.
vscodium[0] might require some aftermarket bells and whistles to reach feature parity with jetbrains' "swiss army kitchen sink" approach but at least vscodium is not data-mining me.
[0] https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium
Pretty good is pretty bad for a tool I use most of my day.
Considering that Kotlin is their own invention and that it exists mainly to schmooze people onto their platform I sure hope they're ahead with it!
Kotlin is actually a pretty nice language, especially compared to Java. I love how they have null checking as a central feature.
IMO it's an overengineered sloppy mess. It adds too many bells and whistles without taking away anything. Nul checking is about the only serious feature it has. The rest is chrome and bling. It's "ricer" Java.
How is vscode not in the same league? JB feels way too bloated and slow and doesn't add anything significant over other offerings
It's not even close. vscode can approximate JB IDEs but that takes pulling in plugins on your own, managing their configuration, and adapting when the setup inevitably breaks. JB IDEs bake in everything you can get via vscode plugins with documentation, a cohesive experience, and regular maintenance to keep them working for you. Concrete examples that are better in JB land for me: git conflict resolution, refactoring (in numerous ways), jumping to definitions, finding usages (especially on Python projects).
> It's not even close.
That's always been my experience. Not even close. One gives you legos that lets you make a plastic toy, and the other is an industrial machine shop for code.
I thought maybe I was holding VSCode wrong, though.
> I thought maybe I was holding VSCode wrong, though.
Likewise (Same with zed). I've given them a thorough try several times, assuming I was holding it wrong as you say based on conversations with others who use them effectively. I've reached the conclusion you say here each time.
One is a fancy code editor, the other is an IDE.
Yeah, every time I try to move from Webstorm to VS Code, I wind up going back because VS code is just too "generic".
I don't want to spend a lot of time finding, installing, and configuring the right combination of plugins to bring VS Code up to Webstorm level.
Also, I don't trust plugin/extension marketplaces anymore. There is lower exposure in having fewer dependencies.
Code intelligence (find usages, go to definition, refactor/rename/move, etc.) and debugging are on another level - more powerful, more reliable, with more edge-cases covered.
At least, that was so in dynamic languages, like Python, and PHP, last I checked.
For dotnet, Rider runs rings around VSCode. Even using the Resharper plugin, VSCode is nowhere near the same functionality. I even use Rider above Visual Studio because it works way better for mobile and cross platform. VSCode runs okay on the same hardware as Rider, but it is all too manual to configure. VS2026 is a horrible bloated pig that constantly grinds to a halt on the same hardware.
When have you tried VS last? Since they went multi core, it’s usually very fast and it’s mostly R# slowing it down (though I read that improved, dunno).
I use Rider but need VS for some things.
VS2026, "August 2026 feature update" is installed apparently. Even without Resharper, it is not as fast as Rider, and Rider build speeds up MAUI build and deploy by at least 50%
Maybe there exist better ways, but I'd say every coworker I've seen in a VScode variant uses freetext search to find everything.
What about debugging and stepping into a DLL (decompiling it)? Out of the box DotPeek vs whatever vscode plugin you can set up.
But there's plenty of examples.
Just feels like they've been making all the wrong decisions. Quality has been really lackluster, and their attempts to hop onto the AI train have been as annoying as they have been bad. CoPilot sucked. Their own AI coding models suck.
The redesign they've gone for also seems like a supremely weird choice. It's like they're trying to be more like VS Code, when their probably biggest selling point was that unlike VS Code, they offered a full and traditional IDE experience.
Their trajectory has been a deeply questionable mix of change for the sake of change and nervously doing what everyone else is doing.
I bet they thought any AI could never deliver what we have today this fast.
Visual Studio, RAD Studio, Eclipse, Netbeans, XCode, QtCreator, KDevelop are still around and good enough for most workflows.
There are even areas in which some of those best IntelliJ IDEs.
One such thing that Xcode has that IntelliJ doesn’t is per-pane history. In Xcode hitting back/forward navigates history for your focused editor pane whereas IntelliJ’s navigates history across all editor panes.
This might sound like a minor difference, but Xcode’s way gets me to where I want to go more quickly most of the time because I’m not having to wade through the likely-irrelevant history of the other panes. It’s a frequent frustration whenever I have to use an IntelliJ IDE.
Seems weird. If it's irrelevant then why were you just there?
Jumping through a stack of functions across classes and back seems like the most common case to me. I'm glad you like it but I would hate that.
I tend to split panes by functional role, so for example in one pane I might be jumping through view code while in the other I might be working with view models. It’s not helpful to bounce me up and down the editing history of the view model file to the right when the intention is to quickly jump though view file history on the left (or vice versa).
The best thing to do would be to make it a checkbox, like IntelliJ does for almost everything else, but not that for some reason.
Another example, it took several years for JetBrains to add mixed language JNI debugging in IntelliJ, between Java and C, C++. Something that Eclipse and Netbeans were already doing in 2005.
Their revenue is still going up so I don't think that's it.
Only?
Microsoft's stuff is quite good, or you've got a really high bar.
Mostly constrained to a single ecosystem and dev/deployment platform - a platform that has never been particularly great for development and has been made vastly less so in the recent years.
> Microsoft
> quite good
Good one.
Happy to hate on MS as much as the next guy but VSCode is pretty much the Chrome of the IDE world at this point, that might be what parent was alluding to (since I'd struggle to defend any other Microsoft software).
VSCode is not an IDE. It's a text editor with some optional bells and whistles. I presume the GP refers to the actual Visual Studio.
Visual Studio is less shit than ever, but only after JetBrains gave MS a firm kick up the ass with Rider.
It's got an editor, a debugger, code intelligence, a debugger, terminal, task running, test explorer, refactoring tools, project management, and so on. What's an IDE if not a text editor with bells and whistles?
It's got each, but they're holding together with duct tape.
It's really not an option in Javaland.
It's almost as if a company can have good and bad products...
Microsoft has had a very long reputation (for good reason) for having good developer tooling, even if Windows was not particularly developer friendly...
Check out Zed IDE - it's exactly what JetBrains Fleet should've been. Native, fast, and built for "code by hand", but also with some AI features.
Their revenue is up, why is them investing more a bad thing?
What do you mean, we still have neovim
I still haven’t found an IDE that I feel really helps me develop with AI better than the command line. I have built bespoke tools that work the way I want. But a really good integrated solution would blow my current workflow out of the water. No one seems to have built an IDE with deep support for worktrees, parallel session, walking me thru diffs, and optionally handing control back to me to write the occasional hand-written code myself. Plus most of my work is done on mobile, so Jetbrains has an amazing opportunity…but they seem to be chasing the competition instead of focusing on their moat.
Right now there's a huge friction with IDEs, that if I have it open while claude is working on something, then any caches it has get stale very quickly, and it churns processing trying to keep up with edits.
Any leverage that claude could benefit from LSPs or language/AST MCPs is undone by that tooling not being able to keep up or stay fresh, so the IDE just "runs hot" for no purpose.
Which means I'm incentivised to close my IDE while claude is working, and now I've got used to not looking at the code.
Like you, I really want a system that works better. I want claude to search and edit through better tooling, it would be faster, more accurate, and should in theory be able to leverage compilers to apply edits better and more accurately.
I don't want claude wasting an awful lot of time grepping for things that a compiler cache can answer, but if that compiler cache can't keep up then it's actively harmful.
I'm sure there must be a better way, there must be a way to have smarter more change-aware cache invalidation, and smarter more cache-aware claude tool use, but so far none has happened.
Long term I'm sure the pairing will emerge, but unfortunately I don't think that's going to come from the IDE vendor side, it'll have to come out of some harness research lab, where Anthropic or a competitor finds a way to reliably leverage this stuff for a speed and accuracy boost.
It's completely bonkers to me that an LLM can almost "natively" read profiler output, but doing so involves vast amounts of text and context ingestion, when there are real tools sitting there that it ignores in preference for either reading vast amounts or iffy python one-shot scripts to parse stuff.
This 100%. My current workflow is switching between CC and VS Code to review code, and it's extremely clunky. There is still not a single harness/ADE that can do everything correctly in one tool.
I think this is what JetBrains Air is supposed to be. I haven't had a chance to test it but it seems promising.
https://www.jetbrains.com/air/
Yeah, one limit for me is I need to use the subscriptions, so I'm tied to the Claude Code and Codex harnesses. The best solution IMO is a "bring-your-own-harness" one, where you can drop in whatever harness works the best for you and your development environment can be driven by it.
Air itself as well as the new Air plugin for the IDEs and the AI assistant support ChatGPT subscriptions, though you may have to disable JetBrains as a provider so that it's not billed against that. (It's weirdly called logging ot of JetBrains, though you still remain logged in to JetBrains for all other purposes.)
Anthropic is a different story, but I think it may still be possible via the Claude ACP agent (JetBrains' support of ACP is generally pretty good; I use it with anothe harness for open weight models regularly).
It still suffers the same problems as Junie, which is that their harness is far too bloated.
Maybe something like delta? This is still pretty new from the folks that make Zed, but looks promising and would address some of the things you mention https://delta.dev/
> I still haven’t found an IDE that I feel really helps me develop with AI better than the command line.
With Codex GUI app and Astra you can communicate through screenshosts and collages. WAY faster and more precise for many types of jobs and workflows. Literally just scribble crap into the screens and it knows... no need to write out 50 paragraphs of prose to describe a button and its position.
The CLIs have been doing this for a long time, too. :)
> No one seems to have built an IDE with deep support for worktrees, parallel session, walking me thru diffs
Hi, we have such product already, you can try it here: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/33314-air
I will have to try it out. I haven't tried it yet mostly because it seemed like it costed extra or would put me on API pricing. I have tried a workflow with Android Studio with Claude Code, but whenever I opened a worktree it took 5 minutes for Gradle to sync.
Sublime was/is still the best, unfortunately had to finally abandon it due to lack of first-class agent support. Hard to find something that emphasizes core text editing first and that doesn't constantly have some new update to apply on start that may break or change something.
Using Claude to write and sublime to review isn't a bad combo.
+1, Sublime has great search and instant startup time, which makes it perfect for doing small patches around AI-written code
Have you tried Sublime Merge? Looks like a good git flow editor.
https://www.sublimemerge.com/
Same. I feel like JetBrains has an advantage here, so I'm hoping they're working on something compelling. The traditional IDE setup is quickly dying.
I'm usually working between VSCode and Codex/Claude Code at the same time, but find myself mostly in latter these days.
It feels like JB is trying that, but it hasn't materialized in a way I understand yet; they have a handful of AI tools, and I don't fully understand them at this point, nor how they integrate and what roles they fill. (June, Air, AI asssistant, AI autocomplete)
It’s not entirely what you’re asking for but do try to checkout https://onorca.dev
I was using just command line too and Orca just leveled up everything around it. Still using the cli but inside of Orca. I
Orca is too maximalist IMO, and it isn't a lot of work to switch together something with Herdr and a few vibed up plugins to get much (if not all) of the benefits that matter to you without the complexity and weight.
I agree Orca is packed with functionality but I don’t know what “weight” or “complexity” is. It’s just an app on my machine, not some software I’m maintaining. It can be the most complex system for all I care behind the scenes, as long as it runs fast and satisfies my needs I’m pleased - which so far it has been and more. I want to spend as little time thinking about my dev environment and the most amount of time thinking about what I’m developing.
To each their own though, I’ve heard great things about Herdr setups.
This. Terminals, the shell, tmux, vim, LSPs, cscope and similar, an LLM coding harness. That's a lot!
Cursor has support for work trees, parallel chats, will walk you through diffs line by line. This is what I primarily use for the walking through diffs feature. If I need something to just throw over the wall, I fire up claude.
> most of my work is done on mobile
Can anything serious/complex be done on mobile? I'm genuinely curious. It's seems bizzare in the context of IDE and tooling discussion.
When you are paid to sit on your ass to review as much generated code as you can, or to create as much good code as possible given the constraints of a limited amount of tokens, sure. But when you're on your own clock, the trade-off between latency, token budget and quality shifts considerably. And when it actually is a side project (yeah, many meanings of "serious" will be out, I give you that), mobile is just awesome.
That slow trickle of back and forth that gets our intelligent machines called "toasters" in a way not predicted by Battlestar Galactica at all, that really starts shining on mobile. Hands off on terms of signing off every little detail, hands on in terms of never being too far out of the loop, keeping the unattended steps small.
I'm not sure what the problem is after rereading their post? All you need to support everything they said is a remote connection to a heirarchy of worktree-supporting sessions per project, with each having a proper scrolling feed of agent actions taken and your input box.
How do you even review a diff on a phone screen comfortably and effectively?
Sorry, I meant "on mobile apps." I'm still using a laptop. :)
It's purely management fault, it happened around 2022-2023. They had all the chances to become a great agentic IDE/harness at some point, if they would start in time, support plugin developers, allocate a proper team instead of 2 people and some semi-random internships. A lot of users were questioning this publicly and privately with them, we all knew how it will end this way. JetBrains lost, no one wants their Junie in 2026 (and didn't want in 2024-2025, whatever was the name of the integration at that time, it was awful). I was on Ultimate Plan since 2012, appx. I quit entirely in 2024. They asked to answer a few surveys over the last few years - even the questions there were far from reality. RIP, JetBrains, it's mostly unrecoverable at this point.
Their management decisions are strange, right. They had a nice tool called Upsource, we used it for code reviews. Then they sunset it and told us to use JetBrains Space instead. After we migrated to JetBrains Space, they said, oh wait, we sunset it too. So we had to migrate to GitLab. And now, with AI-assisted coding, I don't even need their IDE anymore, because I mostly look at diffs. And that kinda brings us back to Upsource. That thing could have been grown to support AI-assisted development, like, get rid of all the heavy IDE stuff, and just have a place for code reviewing agents' output and merging things. Somewhat like GitLab Lite but fully agentic-oriented. I think it would have covered 99% of our use cases.
I heard rumors JetBrains started going downhill around 2022-2023 because they severed ties with employees in Russia's St. Petersburg, which housed their R&D and all (although many employees were relocated but who knows).
I had a chat with some of their product team. Both Upsource and Space failed to get enough market traction to justify the continuous investment. Same with Code With Me.
On Space case, I think they felt it became too complex to maintain internally while other great alternatives were very hard to compete against.
They were sad about it, as they really worked hard on these products, but it's also easy to understand why they make the decision. Despite the tools being nice, if nobody buy them, it's just a loss.
I didn't use it because it wasn't open source and didn't want to invest time and get lock in to a solution that might be shutdown (which is what happened). If they would have made it open source there would have been more people and companies going to take the risk. Not making Spaces open source was a bad decision.
What IDEs and harnesses do you use now? I assume you would have had a lot of your classic coding workflows dependant on the jetbrains suite
CC + my own custom tools, I don't see any reason to pay for devtools in 2026 (same as trying to monetize them, or even just share/distribute). My first custom solution was built on top of JB's core in early 2024, btw, but not any more. JetBrains "suite" doesn't really lock you in, it's more like "aura" of the product itself that made me attached for almost 13 years (I never was able to switch, I still think VS Code is so ugly and counter-intuitive in comparison with JB).
I have zero clue what you are talking about and I use Jetbrains products every day. PHPStorm is still the default IDE for many developers.
That's totally fine, I'm pretty sure people continue to use JB by inertia, requirements, personal preferences, lack of alternatives, inability to introduce some, or whatever is the reason behind. It's all for good. Most (I'd even say all) people I know jumped off paid JB products within the last two years (C#, Rust, Python, Web stacks), even being evangelists previously (I was religiously protecting and advertising JB in all possible holywars). And in 2023 we already were betting if there's a place for JB "as-is" in the current/future landscape. Too slow, too enterprisish.
Hopefully this is a wake-up call for them to drop the AI hype-chasing and refocus on making the best IDEs for us dinosaurs who, for whatever crazy reason, still code by hand and appreciate solid (deterministic) tools to help us out.
On a very related note, I'm probably very late to this discussion, but has anyone else noticed autocomplete in JetBrains products has gotten significantly worse after the advent of LLMs? It would previously take into account type signatures and all kinds of context, now it's clearly just a very minimal next token generator, often producing code that doesn't even compile.
This tracks with what I've observed, as a fan-and-sometimes-user. They look to be funding a skunk works - which started with their version of Cursor (Jules or something), which wasn't great.
They are working on a cli agent; I tried it, but it silently injected hooks into all my other cli agents to re-target JB inference APIs, which caused me to burn through my JB tokens in like two minutes and b0rked all my running agent sessions.
They are working on a spec-driven thing, which I attempted to try but getting burned by the cli thing I abandoned it. It looks really interesting - it's a meta-harness, built and shipped with one of the Spec-Something frameworks, where you define your own specs for your projects, kinda like snake-eating-it-own-tail-of-specs. If spec-driven is The Future, they are at least trying.
There have been a few other things I can't recall, but my observation is that they are taking generative AI seriously as an existential threat, and probably (as another poster here put it) "heating the office burning tokens".
So a stable company like JetBrains, which sells developer tools and has extensive experience in compilers, ended up with a net financial loss. Meanwhile, Cursor—a startup only a few years old, founded by students, built on a VS Code fork, and primarily powered by OpenAI's API—was valued at $60 billion.
This financial loss is a report at a point in time about that point in time. A company's valuation is also reported at a point in time but it represents an aggregation of how much profit the company might generate across time (please forgive the layman's understanding). They are apples and oranges.
We're at now now...
By Musk, from a company who was doing an IPO and has to deliver flashy things fast.
Don't overestimate the relevance to this.
capitalism optimizes for crap
Ugh, capitalism
At the beginning of the AI race, JetBrains had:
- top-tier language intelligence
- all sorts of applications for building software, from IDEs to task trackers
- a huge, loyal user base
- being big enough to have deals with leading AI providers
They had the potential to lead the AI devtools race. Right now, good but quite basic tools like Pi, Conductor, or Herdr are getting good funding.
But JetBrains just failed to adapt. Their biggest AI attempt – Air – was way worse than Conductor, which is built by a team of few people.
I feel like there are just a few shortsighted people in leadership behind this flop. I will not be surprised if JetBrains will be defunct/shrinked in 5 years.
They still can make a comeback. They don’t have to re-invent the wheel but build a cohesive and tightly integrated experience with Claude Code/Codex or bring your own harness. When it comes to code navigation Jetbrains IDEs are still the best. They would have to improve the code review tooling though because that’s more important nowadays than code writing tools
I don't think this is related to AI. Pre-AI I thought for many years that they have spread themselves too wide and thin. A new IDE pretty much every six months. Unsustainable whilst ignoring their existing customers and products. I think it's inevitable that they've ended up here.
I think they've started to realise that and are trying to reign it in with 'Fleet' and 'Code With Me' deprecations.
As a very heavy user of IDEA, DataGrip and PyCharm, I still appreciate the level of power and flexibility JetBrains offer but continue to be dismayed by the absolutely massive binaries of their IDEs and really bad performance, especially their file watching capabilities which take ages to sync the changes done by external tools into the IDE.
Say what you may, VSCode feels lightweight in comparison despite a lot of plugins (I’m not a VSCode user but I do endure it at work).
Shedding IDE size, decoupling bundled plugins from shipped binaries, and improving file system sync would be great improvements they could do, besides pursuing AI and whatnot.
That’s interesting, as we have just completed a huge migration of our CI/CD infrastructure off Teamcity, for plenty of reasons but “we’re paying a shit ton of money for this and it’s a pain in the ass” was a major one.
They seem to be very bloated and unable to modernize their product lines.
I've been thinking about doing the same, what did you migrate to? I was thinking GitHub actions but the outage yesterday reinforced that it might be a bad idea.
We migrated to buildkite, as it allowed self hosted agents and lots of “building blocks” to extend stuff ourselves.
One of the things we really use heavily is dynamic pipelines, as we have a lot of different stuff.
In teamcity, we had close to 1k build configs, and were able to replace this with about 20 dynamic pipelines in buildkite.
We did need to do a bunch of plumbing, but in this age of AI it means our developers don’t have to rely on devops anymore to get their stuff done to make all this work.
One of the problems was that our devs were “afraid” to alter teamcity build configs, as it all was more fragile than it should be and they were afraid to break stuff.
Teamcity allows for customization with plugins, but all that is so bloated with either Java or Kotlin and requires a shitton of domain specific knowledge to pull off.
Buildkite is much simpler with YAML and their plugin infrastructure which is effectively just hooks into scripts. It’s well designed.
I agree, build kite really blew me away. I know everyone tried to make simple yet powerful abstractions but it usually fails; build kite was the opposite where it was surprisingly better than I expected
Interesting, what did you migrate to? We've had mixed results in reliability between ADO and Github actions.
Long time JB user here, and I mean long time. The past year I have been using claude in the JB terminal but nothing, and I mean nothing new has come of it in that year. Stuck in a tiny terminal window, opening files every so often. A couple months ago I switched back to iTerm2, full screen and use sublime to open the odd file every so often. So this makes 100% sense. They need to do a better job integrating with agents and not pushing their own.
> Long time JB user here, and I mean long time. The past year I have been using claude in the JB terminal but nothing, and I mean nothing new has come of it in that year.
I don't get these comments. JetBrains AI assistant supports ClaudeCode, Codex and any ACP harness including OpenCode, in addition to their own. What is it with people saying they're stuck in the JB terminal etc. if they want Claude?
I cancelled my JetBrains subscription a year ago when they announced price increases.
The quality of their software has been falling despite all recurring revenue. I used JetBrains for almost a decade because it just worked. JetBrains Toolbox is some of the worst software I've used, it causes more problems that it solves for me.
Needing to install a different IDE per language is also something I dislike about JetBrains, but not a deal breaker.
VS Code has had a working remote SSH plugin for almost a decade now. Jetbrains took years to implement anything more than file sync, then when they finally added Gateway it could never even copy it's own settings.
These days, I spend more time on Gitlab reviewing code than in my IDE, and it's been the case for a couple of months already.
In my opinion sunsetting JetBrains Space was a major strategic mistake. It would have given them the moat they currently crave for to compete in the AI space, by enabling cool AI powered features (codex like sandboxes connected to their ides etc...).
All their AI products currently feel like desparate shots in the dark, while Jetbrains Space would have been a natural home, delivering strong value and differentiation.
Once Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode matured and discredited Junie, the next thing i looked for was a code review and CI/CD environment that was as seamlessly integrated to my IDE as possible. I was baffled to discover that JetBrains had just that but decided to sunset it in the midst of the AI war. Absolutely baffling....
IMO there’s a ton of room for innovation in the IDE space.
It looks like software dev is going the way of natural language as the final spec that humans see. Regardless of whether this is a good idea or not, it’s happening. My boss asked us not to write any code manually starting in Jan, and now has hinted that we should stop reviewing code too.
Natural language as spec obviously has a ton of limitations. And here an opinionated IDE that can define this sort of workflow better is primed to gain a lot of market share, devs clearly aren’t fussed about switching between IDEs right now.
I should be able to, for example, click on a plantuml diagram and see what the endpoint definitions are, See where the request schemas are.
If I have Agents.md files scattered across my codebase I would like my IDE to help me manage them
Revenue is up. Looks like they took on a lot of debt. What did they spend it on?
After decades of being happy for my JetBrain, I cancelled my all productssubscription this week. I find that the quality of the tool has gone down the drain. I replaced Datagrip with TablePlus and I don't really need Pycharm, IDEA that much anymore. Recently, I kept complaining about it not working properly. To give one example, the connections over SSH suck and regularly force me to restart the app.
I makes me sad. Jetbains used to be a company I looked up to because it always positively surprised me. Now I keep complaining.
I still love my IDEA & Rider, but a lot of my attention has moved to VSCode with Claude Code plugin. The Claude plugin/tooling for these IDE's is abysmal in comparison (talking strictly about the Claude Code experience here - not the bundlende AI Assistant.
I am not moving away from JetBrains anytime soon, but it does gets harder to justify when I spend considerable time in a competing offering that has better experience and is free...
This probably is not a reflection of their products but, boy do I wish it was!
As a long time C++ developer on Linux Clion was the best there was and it seems that they've completely neglected the core product. The core features are in a free fall while they keep adding new smart AI crap and shuffling the UI around and adding new show stopper bugs.
Hopefully they're investing in better llm integration. I really want to automatically use the jetbrains diff for every llm code change locally.
I also want to have the jetbrains code quality scans automatically ran and fixed, and maybe something that enforces permissions and a sandbox. Basically I want the IDE to be more of a control interface.
Between VSCode and AI, all the engineers I work with have stopped using JetBrains products.
I don't think the problem is AI itself; they can have AI too, AI as capable as something like Cursor, for example. The issue is that their product is bloated and slow, and much of the technological leadership they once had has been overtaken by VSCode.
> The issue is that their product is bloated and slow
I disgree. Use their ide on a 16gb laptop and never had any performance issues. AI is the problem. Openai and anthropic are eating their lunch.
Jetbrains IDEs are far from bloated and slow especially compared to electron and chromium based software. Besides - they are still growing in revenue so the financial loss probably isn't due to users jumping ship.
For Android development I still prefer Android Studio (IntelliJ based). Maybe just a habit because I don't really write code there anymore. For everything else usually VS Code.
JetBrains product for me got worse over time. PyCharm performance issues were so bad I stopped using the IDE and switched. So I no longer pay for the premimum features. Ontop of it all their remote features do not work well and is super laggy.
One sad thing is they gave up on Fleet and never unified all their IDEs. Reality is many people work in many languages and need to have good support for multiple langauges. The plugin model for other langauges in a primary langauge sorta works but it's not great compared to VSCode which can support many many languages.
Engineers abandoning IDEs or did they burn a ton of cash on AI?
I have paid out of pocket for Jetbrains for 15 years. I don’t think I’ve opened it in the past year and should probably cancel my subscription.
For me, the things that made Jebteains great just don’t matter anymore.
What do you use then?
I still use it a lot for reviewing the code.
It is a good code viewer but way too heavy if you want to switch between branches often on a sufficiently large product.
VSCode for the rare time I need to view a file.
GitHub or Tuicr for code review. Still waiting for an agentic first review environment- which Jetbrains has missed the ball on.
You'll be surprised (or not) to find out a lot of people aren't using anything. Claude gets asked to build it, then some other clown uses their copy of Claude to do the PR review and then it gets merged.
given that their revenue is still increasing, I'm guessing it's the latter
Their revenue is increasing, but their profits have been on a decline despite increased revenue. The table on that page only goes back to 2021, but the trend of increasing revenue and decreasing profits has been going on at least that long. I don’t think ai would have been a factor that far back. Even though github copilot did launch sometime around then, I doubt it was much of a factor.
Like or not, LLM are getting better at debugging than humans... Not sure for how long will companies will keep paying for IDEs (which, tbf, are peanuts compared to the LLM cost).
What stands out to me is https://www.helgilibrary.com/companies/jetbrains/total-cash-...
I have no idea what that contains, but it appears to be a rather large dip, compared to previous years. Overall it's not really that interesting without context and commentary from JetBrains.
I find IntelliJ IDEA a great tool, even for my fully vibecoded apps. I edit the READMEs in it, look at the version history, use it for debugging, for builds, and so on.
My guess is that people aren't abandoning their IDEs. Their market is probably growing. I suspect they're burning money on subsidized inference, just like everybody else.
Why not both?
If engineers are abandoning IDEs then shouldn't they be following the engineers?
I canceled my DotNet Ultimate subscription (or whatever it's called) earlier this year, even though Rider is (was) one of the best IDEs for my main squeeze, F#. It's not because I don't use Rider or IDEs, but because I've felt the quality has gone downhill ever since I first started paying for it. What broke the camel's back was the constant surveys they were sending me surveys asking how much I love AI in Rider, and how much I wanted to see more AI in their IDEs, when all I wanted was an IDE that didn't have some shitty new F# language bug every time I updated it.
Ironically, I finally got around to using AI to configure my Neovim setup with a decent F# and C# experience. I don't have it set up with a debugger yet, but at least I'm not paying hundreds of dollars every year for a company to neglect the thing I paid for.
Both
The truth is there is no money to be made from (good) offline software.
Jetbrains lost our entire (small) team a few years back when they completely neglected (no, to minimal progress for years) their typehint support in PyCharm. I think they now finally have caught up somewhat judging from the updated on all the issues in youtrack I'm still subscribed to.
Every time I open a new IntelliJ window now it pops open their AI Chat tab just to tell me "Your organization has disabled AI Assistant"
I uninstalled the plugin and it continues to open the AI Chat tab to helpfully suggest I install it
They keep trying to bite into AI but they should focus on making their tools more stable and should have invested more into Kotlin Native, could of had a fully native IDE and tooling by now and purged reliance on the JVM.
They could have bought out Cursor early on too.
Oh I very much doubt Cursor ever considered selling to a small shop in eastern Europe.
Cause Cursor was so massive? JetBrains is not just some random niche company, they're used in 88 companies out of the Fortune 100, that's nothing to sneeze at.
As far as what they are spending, it is extremely confusing as a ultimate customer. Junie decided to make promotional videos showing their new feature on using local models but its Qwen 3.6-27b that can only run on a Mac M5 laptop and they showed it on a prop plane to say without internet.
Jet brains academy at the same time decided to make an anti AI vibe coding video about how people can't learn with AI.
I am so confused it feels directionless.
I don't think they can compete with AI IDEs. They should maybe focus on the niche that they are good at, and completely get rid of anything ML/AI related. It's going to be a lot cheaper.
It's better to be the king of a niche.
> They should maybe focus on the niche that they are good aT
Ironically, back then they praised JetBrains for not following hype staying focused on IDE and Dev environment
like what , manually refactor code in hours, when agent can do it for you in minutes, or setting up debug/dev env when agent can also do that for you?
Manually refactor code in days if need be, when you have something specific in mind and intend a particular result.
'refactor' isn't just a blender. If I wanted agentic coding I would just do that. I'm quite happy for other people to so completely entangle themselves in agentic coding that they can't get out. Please proceed.
to add: I'm a paying JetBrains customer, but they could lose me if they vibecode themselves into a pile of slop. I'm not sure they're doing that, even if they're dabbling in it. I think there's still expertise there.
This would make sense for me, as a long time Jetbrains user and not desiring to use AI for anything apart from single line code completion, which the current Jetbrains tools do quite well.
I have used their support before, to be extremely impressed. This is an area that they could differentiate themselves in.
They could establish a foothold in AI accelerated development but they sadly aren't doing it, instead focusing on "developing agents" (aka openclaw/pi/codex/claude simulacrum #9998).
Keep rounding UI and adding more AI, and finances will keep going down.
Around a year ago, the org I was working for ditched jetbrains (including teamcity) due to alleged Russian links of some of the founders/owners of jetbrains.
Never looked into it further, but might be a factor...
They put out multiple statements in support of Ukraine. They also indefinitely closed their Russian offices.
https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/03/11/jetbrains-stateme...
https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/12/06/update-on-jetbrai...
Have you done the same when the US invaded Iraq, Iran etc. with Google, Microsoft, Apple, AMD, Intel, NVidia, Netflix etc?
Jetbrains is one of the very tiny number of companies that actually severed their russian links.
Unlike others, like LG or Samsung, that put out a couple of press releases claiming they exited but in reality still do business including marketing or operating factories in russia. Or Apple that just switched all their business through neighboring countries and still continue to remove any app russian government demands and pays all the fines they get
Been a JetBrains customer for over a decade, that used to use several of their IDEs, but don't expect to renew again. IMO they completely dropped the ball on AI integration, everything they forced into the IDE seem to be an annoyance.
Turns out I can easily get by on VS Code / Claude / ChatGPT / Antigravity. DataGrip is going to be hard to replace, but don't need anything more than the current version, hopefully they'll let me keep using it.
You could tell they were adrift and visionless when they started revamping the UI to look as much as VSCode as possible. Thankfully they kept the old version so far as a plugin at least, but I'm ready to jump ship if they drop it. Now they're trying to half heartedly copy as many AI products as possible instead of going all in on their core competencies. I used to be such a fan of JetBrains...
Obviously the narrative will be AI CLI impact but the quality of IntelliJ has taken such a nose dive that I was already looking for alternatives before Claude Code took over the world. IJ used to be one of my most respected pieces of software, it was solid, performant, and the new features were generally thoughtful and well done. That started changing around 2022 and the IDE has been driving the wrong way down a one way street since.
JetBrains is a privately held s.r.o. (LLC equivalent in the Czech Republic), I wonder where have Helgi Library gather so much detailed financial data from about them?
I’m trying to contextualize this information. JetBrains isn’t publicly traded best as I can tell, and these numbers come from other public filings:
> Figures are the company's own (unconsolidated) statutory statements filed with the Czech business register…
Are these as reliable as the U.S. 10K or its European equivalent?
I assume that a company like JetBrains would be investing in shifting products around A.I., so it doesn’t seem too surprising that they don’t report a profit for 2025.
https://or.justice.cz/ias/ui/rejstrik-$firma?p%3A%3Asubmit=x...
then Sbirka listin and download the filings. It's all in Czech so put it through GPT for translation
Summary:
JetBrains s.r.o. went negative because a large foreign-exchange loss overwhelmed a much smaller operating profit. The report explicitly identifies CZK 1.516 billion of currency losses caused by the Czech koruna strengthening against major foreign currencies. But “it was just accounting” would be incomplete: operating profit also fell 63.2%. These accounts use Czech accounting rules, not IFRS.
So two separate things happened: operations deteriorated by CZK 1.291 billion, and the financial result deteriorated by CZK 2.016 billion. Lower taxes cushioned the fall rather than causing it. Approximately 61% of the deterioration before tax came from the financial section and 39% from operations.
For cash generation, the reported operating cash flow is positive—but requires caution. It increased from CZK 5.059 billion to CZK 6.353 billion. However, the 2025 statement includes CZK 6.672 billion of positive net working-capital adjustments, while its before-working-capital subtotal is negative CZK 60.926 million. The positive final figure therefore should not be read as CZK 6.353 billion of recurring cash earnings.
Removing only that disclosed currency loss would produce CZK 1,191.121 million of profit before tax. That is a mechanical sensitivity calculation—not an IFRS profit figure or a fully currency-neutral result. It leaves derivative gains and all other reported amounts unchanged, and it should not be treated as adjusted after-tax profit. The report says the 2025 “other financial income” line consists mainly of derivative income.
That is an interesting piece of reporting.
First, revenue is growing, assets - too. I believe company does some money burning to compete. According to the prev years nett income, they should have collected a reasonable amount of money so a little money burn doesn't harm.
Second, the Gross Profit is only 72.1m whereas the Revenue is 675m. That means, 600m is somewhere in the COGS. Not sure how to read this.
If you open a terminal in their IDEs, top right button, Claude Code, enable MCP. For me, it's the best mix of the two worlds.
Impressive European business with ~750m USD in revenues and global footprint. Hope they innovate themselves into profitability again
The new AI script-kiddies might not be in the target market for purchasing an IDE, so i think their customer base may potentially be shrinking.
Which is a shame really - this is similar to old blacksmithing tools.
The real surprise is how small their balance sheet is given they're such a well known and loved name. 16m CZK is 0.7m USD annual revenue.
There are companies where you'd rather be the owner, and others where you'd rather be an employee, or a customer. I think the JetBrain's customers are the real winners in this one.
> 6m CZK is 0.7m USD annual revenue.
It's 16,000 * 1 million CZK, so ~730m USD, no?
The metric itself is in millions, so the value is 16 billion CZK ~= 738 million USD
Ahh silly me
16,000 * 1,000,000 -> 16,000,000,000 -> 16B CZK ~= 738M USD
0.7M USD annual revenue for Jetbrains? That can't be right. Their annual revenue is 400M+ USD from my quick search.
What caused "Net Financing Costs" to skyrocket? Here is a historical view: https://www.helgilibrary.com/companies/jetbrains/net-financi...
I loved IntelliJ for Java, but I cancelled as I have been AI-pilled to never need to write code again.
I have no idea how Jetbrains are dropping the ball so hard now with agentic coding.
I still use their IDE, but I would love to see a realy native view on Claude Code, that actually shows a preview of an image I pasted for instance, in a view that feels native to the IDE.
I would love if the Jetbrains IDE's got really good agent integration, all their code analysis could have amazing synergy with LLM's, Unfortunatly for now I disabled all AI features as it was slowing my IDE (JetBrains) to a crawl.
It isn't as much the price of a license as much as the time it takes to get approval for newer engineers and contractors. You can just say, "we use vs code with these extensions and wsl2" and the discussion is over.
Either a whole lot of money is about to be sucked out of markets or money is about to massively devalue. This is the bill coming due for the zero interest rate years, seen from one company's vantage point.
Its pretty sad because JetBrains products are great ive been using them for a while and its even free for students. VSC is great but i feel like JB products are more refined since I code in Go and Python.
Unfortunate because they make great products, but also expected given AI. A bit like Nokia, they're a great company that didn't do anything particularly wrong but they got swept by a superior technology.
It is a private firm. Are they publishing their revenue and costs?
Jetbrains dropped the ball hard with Junie and their typescript performance bugs. I left cause of the latter and the former could never compete with the rest of the ecosystem.
I think I have been using their tools since they started. Jetbrains could have been Cursor of IDE world, but they missed it with so many confusing AI offering
An IDE connects a human coder to the development process. If the role of that coder changes in that process, the IDE connection is not going to be as heavy as it used to be.
This along with stack overflow seems to be the end of an era. Stack overflow had my back and JetBrains was like a super magical tool that I could tackle code bases with.
I renewed my WebStorm license for $32.90/year and it comes with $3/mo free AI credits, plus cloud-based completions
I hope they have something great up their sleeve... would be a shame if that gem of a company got killed by AI.
Software is changing. It would be a good time to invest rather than to focus on the bottom line. Their revenue is up.
I’m not surprised.
I wish they would turn their entire IDE into a CLI that an agent could use to more efficiently do work.
They have't really given us something for the new era and they are positioned to be ahead of everyone
They probably have very good financial cushions. One year of losses is nothing to a company like that.
They only need to have some hundreds of billions of loss extra, and they might be the next big thing!
loss size must be correlated with the memory usage of webstorm on my work machine...
I thought JetBrains is a private/bootstrapped company.
Where are these financials coming from?
LLM spending. Playing catchup
I am a long time JetBrains subscriber to the all products pack. Their response to recent AI events has been extremely lackluster and I've given them this feedback directly, in feedback and otherwise.
I doubt I will remain a subscriber for the entirety of next year.
Let's look at their AI product, it suuuuucks. They released it, and it literally did not function. I purchased it, and it kept giving me licensing errors. Contacted support and they couldn't tell me anything. Okay, cool, cancel it and refund me. This is useless.
That was a while ago. Today, it still sucks. AI Chat is a bolted-on afterthought that looks like a hackathon project and functions like one. Isn't deeply embedded in the editors. Clunky. Slow. Ugly to look at. Doesn't integrate nicely with all the tools. No native AI plugins, you're forced into their garbage.
What are they DOING?!?
10yr+ All Products Pack subber as well, cancelled in August.
They really didn't do well with AI integration the past few years. When Cursor was all the rage, JetBrains was pushing their own service whose pricing wasn't transparent and just didn't hold up to SotA. I'd still agree that using Codex or Claude from CLI is a better user experience.
Yet, looks like their revenue is up. Wonder where they're investing.
It's amazing that it even costs extra. Basic functionality shouldn't cost an extra fee, period.
I'm paying hundreds of dollars to use the IDE. The least they could do is integrate well with other harnesses (like every other text editor in the world does).
So VSCode is actually having an impact, most likely.
While the revenue is up so is the cost... and looking at what they've been doing I'd argue they are just burning money on questionable investments.
"Hey! Look! We grew to power by making perfect, powerful development IDE! Let's get a bunch DeZiGnErS on board to dumb it down and piss off everyone"
Yes, I HATE their new UIs (we are on the second take where we had NewUI and now it's Islands)... ClassicUI has almost 1m downloads because it makes the UI _sane_ and while I renewed my subscription for AllPack this year I've done it griting my teath... will see next year if I'll stick…
They need to put a whole lot of love in Junie, but even at that Warp is already miles ahead... so playing catch up is going to be a tough one.
Android Studio always was Google acquisition bait, but now they are going to need to be more serious about it.
I think this is because it's still expensive to put themselves into some related businesses before there's not much need for a human UI IDE. But maybe it is now or never to get some of those products visible. If you don't have a little brand recognition now with some sign of historic existence you are going to be a crab in the AI slop bucket.
I don't have plans to stop using Jetbrains any time soon but I can't deny my satisfaction in their products has been declining for a couple of years. Still, nothing else is as good. I wish they'd spent a cycle or two on performance and bugs.
All the air is getting sucked out of software companies due to AI, I'm seeing it happen in a number of places. Though in this case it may be due to their own AI investment on internal projects.
What's an IDE
Still the best code editor. Plus it doesn't have blood written all over it, like VS Code.
I don't care much about JetBrains, but I hope they IDEA a FOSS application as soon as they realize it's the end of the road.
it already is (the platform, and all of core Java and Kotlin support)
https://github.com/jetbrains/intellij-community
On one hand I wonder if JetBrain could have done something like Cursor better with it's deep experience, and at the same time AI software driven can require a complete fresh perspective, and I do hope JetBrain can reimagine itself to meet software development where it's headed as supports will sorely be needed.
Editor use is on the decline. Heavy bulky IDEs like jetbrains has are close to extinct. After AI our company cancelled the jetbrains ide subscription, as no dev needed it. Most just use vscode or vim, and most stay in the terminal.
This is interesting to me because I only started using JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA specifically to do AI coding.
It was the first time I'd used an IDE, the first time I'd built a cross platform app, first time I'd used Kotlin, and the first time I'd tried AI coding.
The journey started with choosing KMP as the stack, then I figured "here's the company that released KMP, they have an IDE, they have AI, I'll use that".
It was really useful, and convinced me that AI coding was the future. I didn't know Kotlin (I still don't) and I don't look at any of the code. I do look at diffs sometimes (less and less). My main "review" is "reviewing test failures", which is a workflow I developed over the past year.
It was about 4 months into using it that I figured out that the IDE was really doing nothing.
I rewrote their worktree functionality as a couple of bash scripts. The build and test functionality was all gradle on the command line anyway. I was just using it as a chat interface and a markdown reader.
So I set up tmux and used Junie CLI (I liked Junie as an agent), Kimi Code and Pi Coding agent simultaneously on different projects. Junie CLI was pretty good, but it had too many instructions and when I started getting particular about my workflows, compliance was too difficult.
Kimi Code and Pi kept winning, eventually I stopped using Junie altogether. The name of the game was doing things in parallel and in the background. Editing the code had nothing to do with it.
The thing I missed was how JetBrains AI credits worked. I loved switching between models, and didn't want to tell everyone on the team to have their own accounts. I looked around and saw some LLM gateways and stuff like OpenRouter, but then they are all still charging extra, so I just wrote my own LLM gateway and connected it to Pi.
But then I was like "what is Pi really doing here?". I wanted a thing I could use from my phone, and using tmux over Termius is pretty weak, so I was like "Oh maybe I can have a mobile app that uses Pi as an API or something" but then I kept hearing the creator of Pi talk about how simple the coding loop was so I just wrote the coding loop into my LLM gateway and then created clients for it for iOS, android, macOS, windows and web, all using Kotlin Multiplatform.
Now I've got my dream coding agent: I create work trees at the touch of a button from my phone, I discuss with the agent using the "reply mode" interleaved reply feature, I have a flexible bash script based workflow engine, a centralised script/skill distribution framework, centralised billing/model gateway, all built into a single dev box that runs everything and can be deployed using one of those fancy curl -> bash pipeline things. I can deploy to dev, staging and production at the touch of a button from my phone. Dev and staging are IP gated behind CloudFlare tunnels, the production deployment goes straight to GCP, using a standardised framework.
My colleagues and I use it to ship real internal and external products and they're not even developers.
I haven't read any code or reviewed any "PRs". I don't even use GitHub or linear!! But man when I go for a walk and sit down on park benches and dictate to my coding agent in my phone, set the workflow running and then keep walking it feels like a super power!
And this was more or less 1 year from starting my first project using IntelliJ IDEA + Junie + OpenAI GPT 5 and winding up using a mix of models on my own platform that I share with my colleagues.
I don't understand how an IDE development company or, really, any "coding agent development" company can maintain a competitive edge in the face of that kind of pressure.
EDIT: I did find their Air product very intriguing but they didn't get it released quickly enough and it didn't solve the problem of having things running in the background easily enough. Also their worktree setup and teardown functionality was a bit of a drag. I built my own platform and started using it to build itself quicker than they got Air to the stage where I would want to use it. They STILL haven't released their mobile client.
I had the same problem with tmux on my phone so I made my own SSH app termphin.dev. I start Claude Code, lock my phone and come back later. Being able to code from anywhere really does feel like a superpower.
Seems as if their expenditures increased a little bit. I don't think this is huge, since they did not perform that well in 2022 either.
No disrespect meant, but I don't see how companies like JetBrains can survive (and I've read their financial statements, their revenue growth is still decent). All their revenue comes from products and services that are effectively a long-form agentic session, proven by how many OSS replicas of their stack is out there. Their Junie agent (itself a replica of all other agents on the market) can ITSELF be replicated in a few dozen prompts, as evidenced by the 1000+ GitHub agent repos out there, most of whom are operated by a single college student. What's worse is that JetBrains' primary customer base is supposed to be composed of technical users and developers, the exact cohort that should be skilled enough to use LLMs to replicate their services for effectively zero cost. I guess the only thing that's saving them is inertia and goodwill.
programming is dead! accept that!
they've made a series of customer-hostile decisions in the past few years, so this investment is likely this freight train gathering pace
I hate the JetBrains IDE, which is written in Java. Why can't they re-write it in C++ using Qt or wxWidgets?
It's much more work to make a cross platform GUI app with C++, even if your toolkit is cross platform like Qt. Different compiler tool chains, different system level API's, ARM vs x64 etc.
This is why we see so many Electron apps these days (though Jetbrains was shipping IDE's before electron existed).
> It's much more work to make a cross platform GUI app with C++, even if your toolkit is cross platform like Qt. Different compiler tool chains, different system level API's, ARM vs x64 etc.
Well, that's the entire idea of those multi-platform frameworks: they take that off your hands.
they're finished
Why? Revenue still up. Investment.
Yep, I don't remember the last time I opened up an IDE anymore. I mainly built my own open source AI coding orchestrator lol: https://github.com/saadnvd1/agent-os
The landscape is changing significantly, and I think these types of tools will become more popular.
Yep. Especially considering their primary userbase are technically apt developers, there's zero reason to use any of their products. Especially given how quickly the landscape is changing.
why this is a surprise? I have 0 reasons to buy IDE in 2026.
Their main moat was smart refactor, and a few other nice tools to debug. regardless of what you think about coding is done, agents and your harness is the best tool. I heard they doing business accelerator to find a new business ideas. But as a company, hardly imagine anyone buying expensive IDE in 2 years. Why?
> regardless of what you think about coding is done, agents and your harness is the best tool.
I guess you're all in on that Anthropic IPO with the "coding is solved" approach.
There will always be people that write code with pen and paper. Its going to be an art form though rather than something productive.
> why this is a surprise? I have 0 reasons to buy IDE in 2026.
If the first part follows the second, the surprise is that revenue is up while the prevailing opinion appears to be "no-one needs to buy an IDE".
IDEs are on a steep decline, so not so surprising. I've disabled most code extensions from vscode and find myself using multiple terminals and the built in git diff UI. I barely see the code _as a whole_, only care about the _code_ changes.
edit: added the extra words + I must mention I'm talking about legacy maintenance projects