JetBrains Air: The IDE Era Is Ending, and JetBrains Is Building for What Comes Next
JetBrains Air: A System of Products for Agentic Software Development
JetBrains Air is a multi-vendor system of products for agentic software development, spanning developers, teams, and organizations. It includes Air in JetBrains IDEs, Air Teams, and Air Governance, with support for multiple agents via the Agent Client Protocol. The core argument: AI makes code cheaper to generate but more expensive to verify, so the real bottleneck is understanding, coordinating, and owning the change.
An agent will not get the call at 3:00 am when something breaks. The responsibility for what ships still belongs to the people and organizations that ship it.
- throwaw12
I like JetBrains as a company, their pricing for individuals made a lot of sense, you buy the license and you can keep using perpetual license for that version, if you want to buy newer version, you pay slightly less than year before.
I want them to succeed, but can't see how they can win in this agentic world, where people are barely opening their IDEs, and living in agents terminal whole day and from time to time opening a PR to get a review
- joshstrange
I’ll try this out but after over a decade as a paid JetBrains customer I’ve been looking at the door. I still love their IDE and moving around the code in it but the IDE uses way too many resources. Even with me excluding the worktrees folder it gets stuck indexing/processing when I spin up new worktrees to the point that I’ve found myself killing IDEA regularly to regain system resources. 99% of my work happens in the terminal now and JetBrains has been very slow to adapt. If I get one more “can’t checkout branch, it’s checked out in a worktree” error I’m going to lose my mind, give me an auto-heal option or something. This is how work is done, don’t make me leave your IDE to fix it myself on the cli.
I’ll try out Air but I don’t have high hopes, my current workflows work great and I’m still not sold on what Air offers even after reading this post and the page about Air.
- delbronski
I’ve been a happy paying JetBrains customer for 10+ years. This year I decided not to renew. It’s just not worth it anymore. I don’t spend as much time as i used to in an IDE. And their AI offerings are not so great. I gave Junie a solid try, but it was always too far behind the competition. I gave Air a solid try, but it was full of bugs. I wish them the best, and I hope they can find a solid product again in this new era.
- hmokiguess
I would love to see JetBrains win, I like them as a business, though unfortunately I haven't been using their products in a long time now.
- hypfer
Semi-OT, but does anyone here know what exactly happened at JetBrains?
Their IDEs have been nosediving for years now in a way usually reserved to "has been acquired by private equity". But they have not been acquired by private equity as far as I can tell.
I'm writing this from my laptop, where each keypress in a .md file in WebStorm makes the fan spin up (not hyperbole).
What happened, JetBrains?
- ookblah
people need to stop trying to build the same walled gardens with these development environments. nobody has time to buy in at this point or try to grok what your specific vision of "agentic development" is.
- bni
I have Ghostty with Claude open with one tab per project. Then I have IntelliJ open also with one tab per project.
I find this setup works great for actually participating in the development. To understand what is happening and keep the mental model of what the project is about. Review in progress work in IntelliJ, use the Git, Database and REST(.http files) in the IDE as the agents generate the code.
I don't see a problem with this setup is it really that uncommon? Have people stopped using TOOLS completely? That said I don't have much interest in these JetBrains AI products, at least not currently.
- giancarlostoro
Is anyone using any of JetBrains AI offerings? I feel like they are burning piles of money on areas I never hear anyone talking about using. The only thing I ever used was their AI plugin, tried Junie once, but the rest just seems like noise I dont care about.