I've been paying JetBrains in a personal capacity for about 15 years. Almost from the first year of my professional career. I didn't renew this year. I feel so sad and disheartened that a company that produced such brilliant tools have completely lost the plot on AI. They had started work on Fleet, a lightweight VSCode like IDE, before LLMs became big, but abandoned the effort without seeing it through. It could've been a great agentic IDE (all I want is whole file+project view for every conversation, instead of just diff so I can have a better perspective of the codebase). Instead they built multiple confusing tools (might be internal org structure and competition leaking out), and took far too long to adopt SOTA CLI coding agents, and kept charging for it as a separate subscription. I wish they do a whole company rethink on agentic development, but it is going to be tough because the existing enterprise licenses will continue to be the main revenue driver for a few more years, until it all dries up all at once.
Same thing. I've been using JetBrains IDEs for 25 years, and by now the keyboard shortcuts are hardwired into my fingers.
They fumbled the initial rollout with the way they gate-kept the agents behind their own subscription. I used Claude through its API pricing for a while, and the UI experience with the sidebar chat was so much better than the Claude CLI.
I could see the thought stream, click on artifacts, view diffs, etc. But it burned through tokens way too quickly, so I downgraded to the CLI agent.
At least I can use IDEA's inspections through the MCP server. It enables the agent to use the IDEA's index for navigation (finding usages, locating symbols, etc.)
I'm using Serena-MCP with the IDEA plugin. It opens up more features than the standard IDEA MCP.
Now, you can use a standard Codex (and maybe Claude) subscription inside of a sidebar, and get a lot of the features you mentioned. It's nice, if you're trying to be more involved with the code, but not as nice for multi-agent stuff.
I use IntelliJ at my current gig—and the CoPilot plugin for AI, because it’s what I have access to—and it has become ClaudeCode-esque of late: sub-agents, skills, tool-calling, hooks…and continues to improve. It’s unfortunate how the AI-in-a-sidebar UI kind of hides how sophisticated it has grown, but it’s a glass of ice water in hell in an environment where you can’t easily procure what you want.
