For me, I pay Jetbrains every year because I want a fully local IDE. I absolutely do NOT want any kind of cloud integration because that means my workflow becomes dependent on Jetbrains or whatever third party is powering the integration. At that point, all of the value of Jetbrains is gone, at least for me, and I could use any other editor. VSCode is much easier to use with dev containers based on my experience.
The other thing that's frustrating is the willingness to ship code off to some third party server / service. Again, I'm paying to NOT have that.
Personally, I don't think Jetbrains will hold out much longer and this is a sign of that. If the people making these decisions have enough power (internally) to put a cloud connected AI assistant in my face, I think it's only a matter of time until they become infested with service based monetization schemes that turn their products into the same junk we're seeing from everyone else in the industry.
Jetbrains needs to re-evaluate what their customers are paying for because they seem to be misguided.
I see some people singing the praises of AI which hasn't been my experience. Any time I ask it about a topic where I'd consider myself an expert, it's wildly wrong. It only seems useful when I ask it about topics where I have very little understanding because the responses are confident sounding and well organized.
So my hunch is that people finding it useful are probably below average developers that don't know what they don't know.
And most of what I said was relating to the direction Jetbrains is moving. As soon as they start adding service based integrations, it's a slippery slope and we could end up with IDEs that depend on calling out to Jetbrains' services to function.
That's the exact opposite of what I want from Jetbrains and keeping that kind of stuff out of the IDE is the reason I pay them every year.
I guess the main reason the plugin is enabled by default is to promote it. AI tools are becoming an important part of the development workflow, with a majority of developers using a chat LLM or Copilot (https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/ai/). So the functionality offered by the plugin might be interesting to a large part of the user base. A non-bundled plugin would not be discovered by most users. And for organizations it looks like the AI assistant is disabled by default.
Regarding the direction - LLMs are usually used as a service right now, so there's not much choice. At the same time, JetBrains is also working on local smart completion workflows like https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/14823-full-line-code-co.... Hopefully at some point there'll also be an option to use a local LLM with the AI Assistant.
> Hopefully at some point there'll also be an option to use a local LLM with the AI Assistant.
I would love something where I could pick the inputs or at least give it inputs that skew results. Right now I think the big problem with AI is bad input. Most of the dataset that's publicly available is junk. A lot of "answers" are people guessing at stuff they don't understand.
Honestly, I don't even know if (or how) LLMs work if you train them with a smaller, more accurate dataset.
Nobody forces stuff onto you. You can disable everything with just one checkbox.
Nothing has changed. The plugin is enabled by default but it does nothing unless activated. "Enabled" doesn't mean it's doing anything.
> Again, I'm paying to NOT have that.
So don't.
>So my hunch is that people finding it useful are probably below average developers that don't know what they don't know.
Nope, I'm definitely an excellent developer and I find it useful.
I'm not talking about this feature exclusively. This is a good integration for them to justify charging extra and to justify a dependence on a third party service that you can't host locally.
If this is viewed as a success for them, there's a lot of incentive for the next feature to be a service based cloud integration. And the next and the next... Suddenly we'll be 5 years into the future and development workflows will be completely dependent on cloud integrations and, as developers, we'll be subjected to terms and conditions that are detrimental to us because we don't have any other options.
Look at how Microsoft is moving Office into the cloud. When you try to open a document everything defaults to getting you to interact with, and rely on, OneDrive. Most of the collaborative features already rely on OneDrive. Once they've discontinued perpetual licenses and everything is subscription based, they'll probably make it even harder to rely on plain old documents on the local file system.
Who do you think that benefits more, you or Microsoft? Where's your leverage when Microsoft says prices are going up? You don't have any because your day-to-day workflow has become dependent on their services. What happens if they ban you? Can you do any work tomorrow?
What I'm saying is the reason I pay Jetbrains is because, in my mind, I'm paying for a product that isn't going to get developed to eventually detriment my interests for the benefit of Jetbrains.
What do you think the long term goal of VSCode is? I think it's to get as many developers as possible to depend on it for their workflow so Microsoft can slowly shift more and more functionality to cloud connected services with the end goal of having everyone pay to have their development environments dependent on premium, for-pay Microsoft services with everything, including your development environment, running on Azure.
Every time something shifts to benefit large corporations at the expense of users there are always people like you in the comments that can't see the downsides if a critical mass of users accept the changes.
> Nothing has changed.
Except Jetbrains is about to get their first taste of what it's like to have some of their customers dependent on a feature that isn't available locally. If it's seen as a financial success, do you think they'll be able to resist the temptation to start moving everything they can to cloud connected features?
Well that's weird because:
a) Everyone else is
b) You definitely seem to be talking about it and specifically have targeted your comment to this feature in the comments section about this feature
So it feels a bit weird to now say "it's not about this feature"...
> there's a lot of incentive f
We can sum up virtually all of your post as "something in the future could be bad". OK, yes, something in the future could be bad. That is always true.
> large corporations
JetBrains isn't even VC funded, they're a privately owned and profitable company. Comparing them to Microsoft without addressing this feels disengenous.
> an't see the downsides if a critical mass of users accept the changes.
I mean, I think it's ridiculous to go "look at how JetBrains is changing" in a thread where everyone has misunderstood a minor bug that in no way indicates that JetBrains is changing. They're adding services, wow how awful.
> Except Jetbrains is about to get their first taste of what it's like to have some of their customers dependent on a feature that isn't available locally.
No one depends on this. Your IDE starts up fine without it. You don't need it. You can use a competing plugin (they already exist) that runs locally or in some other service.
> If it's seen as a financial success, do you think they'll be able to resist the temptation to start moving everything they can to cloud connected features?
I think it would be a ridiculous move for them to completely change their core business model to be exclusively service oriented, yes.