JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant meets irresistible outcry
theregister.com
theregister.com
> "Although the AI Assistant plugin is bundled, and the plugin itself is enabled, there is no AI functionality enabled by default, and no data is sent off-machine without your consent," said Ellis, echoing similar replies posted to some of the discussion threads. "You have to log in, accept the data policies and either purchase a subscription or start a trial."
> There is no AI functionality enabled by default, and no data is sent off-machine without your consent
> "Any data sent to the AI service is not used for training.
So many (maybe most) of the comments on HN don’t reflect the actual situation:
- AI is not enabled by default
- Code is not ingested for training purposes
- You have to either sign up for a trial or purchase a subscription
- You would have to explicitly accept the data policy to even begin using it
So the real complaint of these people is that the plugin simply exists by default, which apparently is enough to get the product banned from certain companies.
All of the comments speculating about it collecting your code for their training purposes or doing 3rd party AI things without your consent, or being enabled without any warning are easily disproven by a quick read of the article. It’s getting hard to read HN comments about anything AI related with all of these comments substituting their own assumptions and assuming the worst case scenario without any effort to read the article.
Surely that can be said of any software - even those without any current AI stub functionality?
I'm confused.
"it" being a more general "boiling frog" patter in tech on how companies started with humble pricings or offerings, but inevtiable try to rent seek more and more. Everything changed to subscription only, or subscriptions started adding ads anyway with you paying even more money for what you had before. I just hate how backhanded so much of it is; if you need to increases prices, increase them. dont't be passive aggressive.
I guess people are calling it "enshittificaion", but it's a crude word I don't particularly care for.
that can be said of any proprietary software with call-home functionality
It didn't need to be bundled and Jetbrains had to provide awkward "delete these files on your system" for the people who genuinely couldn't live with the situation because the uninstall part was bugged.
The purpose of this plugin is to allow you to pay for a service. It's not sending anything anywhere without a subscription. Any other plugin could be malicious and would you ever notice if it started sending your code to an arbitrary third-party?
AI is a hot topic, sure, and it's more likely that someone would want to send confidential code to an AI service than to (say) me, but at the end of the day the underlying policy should be the same: don't send confidential data to a third party without going through the necessary processes.
This is like one of those cheap phones that you can't uninstall Facebook on.
Push the disabled by default, opt-in only version. Face only small backlash because it's opt-in. Then in a later update, switch it to on by default but with an easy opt-out. Then make the opt-out harder or disable other functionality unless users opt-in.
This general pattern happens for all sorts of privacy-invading data collection, advertisements, etc. Companies release a good product, then the enshittification slowly happens over multiple updates, each of which is only a small enough step to not cause too much outrage, until the end product is completely user-hostile.
Also, companies making opt-in features silently into opt-out ones.
This includes Windows as a whole. It's almost incredible how many different settings you have to dig into to get most of them out.
Maybe there’s a reason for this beyond bias?
I mean, HN is a reasonable forum. It’s got a pretty good set of moderation standards. The folk here aren’t particularly prone to take sides blindly without thought or reason.
If you seeing this (and I’m not, particularly, but let’s pretend for a moment you are); maybe AI has an image problem.
Maybe? I mean, what are you looking for? What more from a community like this would you like to see?
Here’s my $0.02:
I use jetbrains products all the time.
I read the article.
I am not anti-AI.
I’m still uncomfortable with it; because today when I was using rider, I got a feedback pop up saying “how would you rate this AI completion?” from a normal completion.
I don’t have assistant enabled. I’ve never used it. I haven’t signed up for it. I’m not using an EAP.
It was probably just a screw up of some kind.
…but, when you deeply integrate this stuff into the platform, that’s what you get; you cant tell when it’s active or not.
It should be a plug-in.
I don’t like it when, for whatever technical reason, I’m forced to use an AI product, when I didn’t opt into using it, and I’m not satisfied, based on my personal experience that they’re doing this right.
Maybe anti AI sentiment you see is more considered, in some cases, than you believe.
Quite honestly if I got a popup like that from any text editor I would never use it again.
Clearly. Look at the players and where the money is, and look at how those players were doing with other tech last decade. No surprise that their goodwill from the get go is not only drained but in debt. Even before going into the actual ethical and logistical quandaries of AI, I was already skewed to be skeptical.
So it is a shame when you see similar mannerisms dropping from companies you did trust. again, even without considering the idea of AI: the company provided a required update that added a new plugin in by default, which leads me to another subscription. This is how the nickel-and-diming starts.
not how I would describe HN.
In many ways it's the online version of the upper class insisting that the silverware must be arranged in a certain way and used only on specific types of food with specific ways of holding them.
It's mostly fake and one of the ways you can see this is the sheer amount of passive aggressive behavior witnessed.
Frankly I didn't expect this kind of scummy behaviour from Jetbrains (installing unremovable, subscription-only plugins that are enabled by default). It's 100% a push to forcibly increase the usage of their AI assistant.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20240203162822/https://www.jetbr...
TBH I'm most frustrated by a product I already paying a subscription to use having a "wink wink nudge nudge" plugin thrown in by default to lure me into a second subscription.
I thought I paid for the IDE precisely to prevent such nickle and diming? If I wanted CI/CD or memory profilers or whatnot I'll find them myself, I don't need to have some menu context option that turns out to not actually be on my machine.
>All of the comments speculating about it collecting your code for their training purposes or doing 3rd party AI things without your consent, or being enabled without any warning are easily disproven by a quick read of the article.
Well that's what happens when some mysterious new plugin finds itself on your dev tools without much acknoledgement. See Notepad++ for a similar controvery for a much more tame update. These aren't casual users who just can't or don't notice such subtle changes to websites.
That said, I do remember some AI update in some notes when I upgraded Rider. I thought it was just some under the hood code completion experiments, but I wasn't expecting it to ultimately install a trial to yet another $10/month service on there.
The "AI" service consumes real resources - it is not free for them to operate, and is a new cost burden that cannot be absorbed by the existing pricing. It makes complete sense for it to be its own cost.
You can also use the offline-only mode, which is 100% free and just runs on your machine.
I hate the "everything as a subscription" model with a passion, but JetBrains is one company that does appear to do it the "right" way where you're paying for continued development, not continued access to the same version.
> Well that's what happens when some mysterious new plugin finds itself on your dev tools without much acknoledgement
It was in the changenotes with a huge section, it was in the newsletter, and the blog.
JetBrains releases a lot of features of plugins, as they always have, so you can choose to slim down the IDE or replace functionality with 3rd party stuff (like copilot).
nit: there is no community edition of Rider as of now (nor CLion from what I saw a few years ago. Could have changed). But yes, that is one thing I do like about Jetbrains.
But as of now I am paying a subscription price and I'm sure if I was on an older version this would want me to update. So now we have 2 subscriptions.
>The "AI" service consumes real resources - it is not free for them to operate, and is a new cost burden that cannot be absorbed by the existing pricing. It makes complete sense for it to be its own cost
sure, I don't care about it being free or paid. I pay for Dotcover as well so I'm not opposed to other paid tools if I find them useful.
I just don't want there to be some constant ploy of "oh you want to use a proile command in the top level menu? You haven't paid yet! Would you like to extend your subscription?" That's an annoying sales pitch. If I don't have a profiler don't put it front in center as if I do.
>JetBrains releases a lot of features of plugins, as they always have,
indeed. Most aren't installed by default, and I don't think any of them have ever retroactively installed in an update.
They do, constantly. It's how their IDEs have always been structured for features. The current version of PyCharm comes with _76_ plugins, and new bundled plugins are added with practically every release.
There's also a small but noticeable trend of them taking over actual for real Open Source plugins and bringing them in-house, as with the Terraform and Rust plugins. I am not only complaining about the closed-sourcing of them, which offends me as a hacker, but also because (at least with the Terraform one) it also became feature-dead, too, which I associate with all closed-source code having to compete with other backlog and corporate pressure for eyeballs
It could be apples-and-oranges because the rust one is getting promoted into its own IDE but still not a good trend
Sure is costs money to operate, most thing do. But that's not a good reason to have what is effectively an ad in a paid ide, plus a plugin that's effectivity dead code installed by default
My disk space is a real resource as well
>I thought I paid for the IDE precisely to prevent such nickle and diming? If I wanted CI/CD or memory profilers or whatnot I'll find them myself, I don't need to have some menu context option that turns out to not actually be on my machine.
Relatable. However, there's also Qodana plugin in the default installation of PyCharm that nudges you, and people don't seem to complain much about that.
Clearly, JetBrains wasn’t foolish enough to secretly send your data to their servers either. If they ever do in the future, bring out all the pitch forks. Until then, it seems like people are just scrambling for something to be upset about for no reason other than it’s something they can discuss on HN.
Because we can trust what corporations say, right?
Nothing has been disproven. And yes, the sole existence of the plugin is enough for IT departments to flag the entire IDE.
It was also not taken positively that Jetbrains decided to auto-deploy the plugin on installations of IDEs. Also, the plugin re-enabled itself after every update. This added to the paranoia in regards to the first point.
What are the other previous examples of this?
Yup, because "installed/not installed" is something companies know how to handle - whether by policy, or by restrictions set by IT. "Installed and enabled/not enabled" is something they're not suited to handle - activation can happen due to misguided user action, or even software update. AI space is still very much unclear wrt. risk/liability, so you can understand corporate being uneasy about it.
Or in more general sense: there's a huge jump between "not existing" and "existing", much greater than between "existing but inert" and "existing and active". Think e.g. about security vulnerabilities: there's a difference between one being unexploited (yet), and it just not being there in the first place.
The llm should have been offline
At least if they either use the user's code in training OR if it uses any code with unknown provenance.
Microsoft's solution seems to be the best: we take responsibility for the code. But that responsibility comes at a cost.
And, if you want AI but only using local models, all the same UI API’s are available to you. (modulo some know-how)
There are also many other cases where it is just outright prohibited, or heavily restricted, even if the aspects you describe were allowed.
Compliance-related challenges due to potentially biased decision making.
Financial regulation compliance concerns.
Government regulations around the application of AI/ML in certain circumstances, or model use restrictions.
JetBrains makes it clear that the code is not submitted for training purposes, contrary to the speculation in a lot of comments.
It’s also not enabled by default and requires a trial or subscription as well, so it’s not something people are going to stumble into accidentally using.
I’m sure some strict companies will forbid the use of any product that might possibly have an AI component, but they’ll be refining policies and making exceptions as everything from operating systems to web browsers start coming with optional AI features.
People are now in the phase of “if there’s no AI we’ll die” of their products so we should expect it will get much worse before it gets better. I’m now mostly turned off whenever I see a company saying they’re adding “more AI” to their products as that usually means the experience is about to get worse.
You can’t just throw AI into your existing product and hope that it will fly. Even the most impressive implementations will hit the hard wall of money. Adding AI to an existing product is far from free and you’ll probably need to upgrade your Pricing pages if you add AI to your core offer.
Heck, even OpenAI is currently having a hard time making ChatGPT+ profitable even though they are pricing it at $25 a month. So imagine all those companies hoping they could easily add "ChatGPT" to their $9.99/m business.
I think there is a reason we still don’t see Siri or Alexa powered by GPT while everyone is hoping it’ll happen : Siri & Alexa have always been designed to be cheap and they still dont know how they will sell you the $30/month Alexa Prime.
If they made a profit right now, all investors would hit the ceiling and tell them to stop doing such insane things. In the current stage they're supposed to grow and take over the market (and build a "platform"), not make profits...
My poorly made point being: executives have been driven insane by AI/ML hype.
I sat through a two day (all day) "retreat" (conference room in our regular office) where people tripped over themselves to present their teams innovative AI ideas to leadership.
"It's a chat bot that..." "It's a chat bot that..." "It's a chat bot that..."
I just wanna make pretty graphics go fast. I don't need to turn everything into a cloud based app with an LLM attached to it.
This is partly because it needs to output reliable well-structured data for downstream integrations.
Do any of you even use the stuff you complain about?
This feature felt like an intrusive Windows Ad or an unwanted U2 Album that has no place in a commercial tool.
Right click -> Hide.
Problem solved faster than it took to write this comment.
> Right click -> Hide
Times 4. I hate it.
There's a whatsapp group where neighbors of my gated community chat, about current issues in the community. Realistically, you mostly see the people that don't work and have nothing to do while their kids return from school . And they basically whine about the most absurd an asinine things. We call it "argüende" in Spanish. People forming a storm in a teacup with these threads look similar to that.
How many times will you suffer that before becoming outraged yourself? That's what I feel after every update, on all the 3 IDEs times 2 of the computers that I'm using. Do you allow me to be annoyed at this?
[1] https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/LLM-1973/Provide-the-po...
Unrelated to this, I've been getting repeatedly irked by JetBrains' insistence that I update disabled plugins alongside IDE updates. Why would I want to update stuff that I don't use?
You can disable it like any other plugin though? Really easily? And it’s a paid service. Just don’t pay for it.
Seems like rage bait that a lot of people are falling for.
Of course, if it turns out it’s phoning home with training data by default then I will also change my tune, but it doesn’t seem to be doing that
A persistently visible ad for a paid service you don't want, in a paid product you paid for? That alone is a justifiable reason for the outrage.
But the more important bit is that, if legal says "no", then "but it's inert" isn't an answer people are willing to risk their employment for.
Also:
> if it turns out it’s phoning home with training data by default then I will also change my tune, but it doesn’t seem to be doing that
We live in the age where open source package managers and build tools come with built-in, opt-out invasive telemetry, and I'm talking bona fide OSS, not something by Microsoft. It's reasonable to assume that the plugin is, or at some point will be, phoning home, until proven otherwise.
Where can I find a list (even partial) of OSS tools with opt-out telemetry?
Reasonable question, but it's a big topic that deserves its own forum.
And yeah. It would probably help me improve the software.
Most telemetry in the real world is literally just like Sentry and "oh there's a crash or error. Here's what the user may have done when it happened" or "this feature is not used as much while this one is very popular". Equating it to police spying on people and imprisoning would-be criminals or innocents is utter nonsense
2. How "data driven" development usually fails in practice, and is a false promise - that is indeed a big and interesting topic, spanning across issues like Goodhart's law, or whether the data is used to "improve your experience" as if the user was a Thanksgiving turkey.
3. But even if you are of pure intentions and able to avoid all the pitfals of 2, I have no reason to believe that. As a user, I don't know you, I don't trust you. All I know is that, before telemetry became something developers suddenly can't do a good job without, it was the domain of spooks, criminals, and shady advertisers. We used to call it "spyware" and classified it as a form of malware. What reason do I have to believe you are and will forever be using this data in my interest, and not against it?
4. Between HIPAA, GDPR and various cybersecurity policies of one's organization/employer, your benign, unadvertised, opt-out telemetry may be landing some of your users in hot water - and it's the major reason why organizations keep getting stricter about what can or cannot be installed on work machines. Savvy users will prefer to avoid your telemetry-rich product, rather than to take the risk of a fuss with IT or Legal if the product captures some bits of protected information.
While I know what you mean, it’s a very tiny and rather subtle icon.
The plugin for Ktor is always there too. I don’t use that. But I’m not raising a fuss.
Yes, this bad, but outrage described in the article is not because of this.
All unhappy customers are complaining the plugin sends the data and they cannot uninstall it.
It is opposite: they need to enable it, accept terms and start paying for the service and only then they concerns might be correct.
I am not even JetBrains user but this is just a FUD for me
Are you referring to the spiral-like “AI Assistant” icon in the right tray? Because that you can easily hide. (Right click → “Hide” → gone.)
Some people will never be happy, e.g.
> We live in the age where open source package managers and build tools come with built-in, opt-out invasive telemetry, and I'm talking bona fide OSS, not something by Microsoft. It's reasonable to assume that the plugin is, or at some point will be, phoning home, until proven otherwise.
That's a false equivalence to OP's point - there's a _stark_ different between telemetry and phoning home with training data.
This is how you lose thousand seats enterprise licensing deals without even realizing it.
> That's a false equivalence to OP's point - there's a _stark_ different between telemetry and phoning home with training data.
Yeah, arguably the former is worse. In the latter case, the data is actually relevant to the product and there's a chance of the user directly benefiting from it.
Oh, you mean like up- and cross-selling CTAs in, well, virtually any SaaS product under the sun? If that was a reason for outrage, we’d spend the work week screaming. Or is it that you just want to be enraged because an LLM is involved here?
Life does kinda suck and we do need to get used to it, I guess. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for a better world, but until we don’t have a working alternative to advertising, I’d rather have models like JetBrains than Adobe…
I get that it feels icky but if you're going to get this outraged about every company that includes an upsell in a paid product you're going to die young. It's hard to think of a paid product without some kind of upsell.
My work MacBook Pro nags me to sign up to Apple Music. My home PC wants me to upgrade my OneDrive account. Google Photos thinks I should buy more storage. The Economist's paid podcast feed wants me to take a subscription to the magazine.
It’s all the rage and tons of people are already paying for CoPilot plugin, only makes sense for IDEA to capture their share of the market but letting users know the feature exists. Other than that it’s not in the way at all.
This here is exactly why telemetry is worth little with general users, and why the whole tech market is supplier-driven: over the past decades, most users have learned to expect software to be broken, devices to suck (except for the vacuum cleaners). They've learned to live with it, only occasionally making futile requests for help to their tech-savvy friends or family members (the well-known "can you fix my computer? it's slow because it got viruses" thing). Telemetry is not observing the frustration, but the coping, so there's very little signal related to quality and usefulness in it.
I meant to highlight your comment, because you uttered the exact words and sentiment I believe best describes the relationship between technology and most of population. This is relevant to the parallel subthread on "what's the gripe with telemetry", and also why we're getting increasingly many little frustrations we're asked to accept. This is why, IMO, the whole "we make what data tells us users want" argument and approach is flawed - the audience is captive, so the data only shows what people are willing to live with.
FWIW, I too believe in choosing your own battles. I don't complain about every little frustration I have with tech either. But I try to not accept it as OK either - for one day, I may be in the supplier position, and I'd like to remember this then, and not make shite products.
Most products that do this tend to be free or one time paid experiences, and it's a single pop-up. I don't necessarily mind someone telling me "hey thanks for using X try Y from us!".
The dynamic changes if I explicitly pay to, in part, not see stuff like that. I don't pay for anything of google except $20/month for some drive space, I won't complain much about ads.
Dynamic changes even more when it's a part of professional tools. Sell a carpenter a new toolbox, but don't mess with their wrench. I don't mind Jetbrains telling me "hey, Rust IDE is here take a look". But don't tamper with Rider or whatever other IDE I'm using in the meantime.
Their response essentially boils down to "it's called a plugIN not a plugOUT"
If it can't be easily removed then why is it even shipped as plugin in the first place? Absolute madness.
If I had any advice to JB, whose tools I have used for years, please start listening to customer feedback better. You’re coming off as corporate overlords who bestow perfected dev tools on developers and it’s not a good look for the company.
Too bad, because it's so bad quality-wise. Worst AI assistant I've tried so far, even compared to first gen Copilot.
If they had made it an optional download and focused on quality instead of enshittification, I would've happily paid for such a thing. As it is, it makes me question whether I should even renew my Jetbrains sub (that I've had for more than a decade).
But still, I don't really understand what the outcry is about. If JetBrains really wanted to siphon off your code for training (or for some other nefarious) purposes, it could do that independently of the AI assistant plugin? The IDEs are closed source, and they constantly talk to JetBrains servers over encrypted channels, so if they really wanted to do it, it would be hard to detect. If it came out it would be the end of JetBrains however, so I don't think they would do that, but they could theoretically do it even without the AI assistant enabled or installed...
If the IDE without the plugin would send code to JetBrains, someone bored and with a packet sniffer will catch them.
If the AI plugin actually sends code to JetBrains, it's part of the plugin functionality.
is this gonna be some fancy organic label for repos?
Create an empty file named .noai in the root directory of the project.
When this file is present, all AI Assistant features are fully disabled for the project. Even if this project is opened in another IDE, the AI Assistant features will not be available.
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/disable-ai-assistant.htm...
If you’re not paying for it, it’s not on. You can also disable the entire plugin from plugin settings if you want.
The linked YouTrack thread[2] in the article says so as well. It is just not possible to remove the plugin entirely from your device.
Regarding the plugin being enabled by default the official response by Jetbrains says [3]
The AI Assistant plugin is enabled by default and menu items and tool windows are visible in the UI. However, AI Assistant functionality is NOT available by default, and NO requests are sent to the JetBrains AI Service unless ALL of the following conditions are met:
- The user has explicitly consented to use the AI Assistant and is using the trial or has purchased the corresponding subscription.
- The AI Assistant has not been disabled for a particular project.
- In the case of a commercial IDE license, the AI Assistant has to have been enabled at the organizational level. We’d like to reiterate that for commercial IDE licenses, unless this is explicitly enabled by your organization’s administrators, AI Assistant will not be available.
[2] https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/LLM-1760/Can-not-remove...
[3] https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/LLM-1760/Can-not-remove...
I think it was something like it would default to enabled again if you uninstalled the updated version, since you can't uninstall the bundled version? I don't quite recall.
But that made people very upset indeed.
Not because of this AI thing, but because IntelliJ IDEA seems to break more and more things on their WSL + Gradle support every update.
I've filed over 15 issues on YouTrack over the years, and almost half of them are Gradle + WSL related.
The latest IDEA update completely broke it for me. I could no longer even load the projects I was working on.
I am so fed up with the complete lack of QA and testing for this fundamental workflow.
Podman is much faster.
Microsoft docu seems to recommend wsl 2 as well. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/compare-versio...
WSL1 was sort of clunky and slow but I feel no difference from using native Linux in WSL2. Plus, the VS Code integration for it is spectacular.
Another option: running Emacs as GUI App in WSL.
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/wsl-tutorial
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-...
Likewise, the "x" button to close tabs is hidden until you hover over the tab. This means that I'll go to try and select a tab and when I move my cursor over the tab and click, an "x" has just appeared under my cursor and I close the tab instead! Whoops, I guess I should have known better than to aim my cursor at the right portion of the tab.
It feels like they're trying to make it seem more like VSCode, but it's just poor UX from where I'm sitting. Plus, as VSCode gets better, I'm finding less reason to keep paying for the JetBrains suite.
I'm dreading the day where the old UI is replaced with the new UI... I might seriously have to look at going back to Visual Studio, and I'd really rather not - I just want to keep the existing, perfectly fine UI!
Switching to neovim was definitely painful at first because I had to figure out all of the plugins to get IDE-level functionality. But after a couple weeks, it was in a good place.
Now, a year later, I’m so much more productive than I was, the UI is nearly instant, and everything is where I want it. And the features don’t generally change much unless I want them to. Only feature that I miss is the git conflict resolution. The jetbrains three-pane UI around merge conflicts is incredible and I still haven’t found a good replacement.
I’ll still take it every time over Mavens XML based config though.
I have a love-hate relationship with Gradle. I think it's a better alternative to XML (if you keep it declarative and any kind of stateful logic the hell out of your build scripts).
BUT. Gradle introduces breaking API changes frequently, and they have changed around "best practices" every year or two.
You can easily see this by using "gradle init" to create a new project. It used to be the case that "buildSrc" was the recommended way to do multi-module build logic composition. But it didn't even work with the recommended "libs.versions.toml" file for managing dep versions (you couldn't reference the generated code from within your buildSrc logic).
Sometimes I consider switching to Maven, lol. Have to weigh the effort required to keep up w/ changes against the benefit of using strongly-typed build files.
I eventually gave up and ate the productivity loss that came from ditching their products.
A somewhat similar example would have been Microsoft way back in the 90s and 2000s bundling their own browser and then almost forcing you to use it. “We have to own this!”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
You can be better, more user focused, have better privacy, but it’s tough to beat good enough and free.
Microsoft wants to own the developer ecosystem and is willing to dump billions in free software and services to annihilate any third party shops. They are pretty close to owning the entire stack of core services and tooling other than the languages themselves.
The sad thing is that in their push to keep up Jetbrains is dropping a major thing that made them appealing vs VSCode: a lack of spying and telemetry.
I think the median developer would rather use Eclipse over IntelliJ's new UI if those were the only options. It looks very pretty, but it's just such a pain in the ass to use. It takes an interface that is already so low-contrast and so hard to parse it's bordering on an accessibility problem, and makes all those regrettable design qualities a hundred times worse.
The one good thing that's it does though is convincingly demonstrate the principle that design is primarily about how something functions, and not how it looks.
They have been pretty vocal that long-term it will be removed and that it probably won't be included in the 2025 version. Of course hopefully they'll come to their senses but the experience will likely get worse and worse longarm even if they keep it...
It's bizarre though. I mean I get that some people might prefer their new look due to various reasons but at that point why not just use VS code and save the $500+...
especially when there are plenty of substitutable tools
Honestly, the biggest reason to use a Mac over anything else may well be Little Snitch. I could probably configure Linux not to phone home on my own, and almost certainly couldn't do so with Windows, but on a Mac with Little Snitch? I know I'm covered.
What makes you think that? Even just editing the HOSTS file will get you there.
And yes, I have seen (and blocked) applications that have made requests to 8.8.8.8 when I didn't have my system DNS server set to that. I would have had no idea if not for Little Snitch alerting me.
If that's a problem for you, then that's clearly a you-problem, not an issue with the community.
You can definitely do this with Safing Portmaster[1].
[1]: https://safing.io
I was doing it with ZoneAlarm on Windows years before Little Snitch even existed, as far as I can tell. If you want to use a Mac, use a Mac, but it doesn't seem sensible to claim it's superior to other platforms when you don't know about them.
I didn’t, I just said I probably couldn’t do so with Windows. If you feel comfortable with ZoneAlarm, then great, but I personally am yet to be convinced that it’s even possible to really lock down a non-Unix (or Unix-like) system. In any case, I’m quite certain I couldn’t do it, and I don’t have nearly enough confidence in my understanding of how Windows network security works (does anyone really?) to say whether any given application works or not.
But if it works for you, then great. All I know is that Little Snitch does the job easily and effectively, and I don’t trust anything else to work as easily or reliably.
You did make that claim, but whatever: "Honestly, the biggest reason to use a Mac over anything else may well be Little Snitch."
I started with NvChad (weird name) and have been happy so far. I love to ecosystem of Pycharm Professional, but I have to restart it frequently as it slows down my system. I haven't been able to determine if it's a specific plugin, or just a result of my fairly bland usage patterns.
- Dead simple to install
- Sane defaults
- IDE like out of the box
- Still feels like VIM
- Configurable
- Actions are discoverable (press space and a menu pops up with all the possible shortcuts)
- Good enough docs
Before I moved to LazyVim I always used VSC with the vim plugin installed before I took the full plunge and went all in on LazyVim (I don't care for vim itself but I like the motions).
It was also the sweet spot for me, I don't like configuring my tools for work but I like using well designed tools and discovering things along the way
These two plugins are the bare minimum in my view.
https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter
Treesitter gives you much better syntax highlighting based on a parser for a given language. It's much more robust than the regex-based default highlighting.
https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig
This plugin helps you connect to a given language LSP quickly with sensible defaults so you can get IDE features. You'll still need to install the LSP though.
https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig/blob/master/doc/ser...
For Python you'll want pylsp. For JavaScript it will depend on what frontend framework you're using, I probably can't help you there.
pylsp itself takes some plugins and you'll probably want them. They're documented at the top of the readme. https://github.com/python-lsp/python-lsp-server
Best of luck! Happy hacking.
Additionally, are the costs of Visual Studio over Rider. My work pays for my Visual Studio Subscription, which does not allow for personal use. The JetBrains Ultimate sub is affordable for me, but this AI integration has me rethinking this.
Why isn’t disabling the plugin/hiding the icon good enough for you?
* Push for new "modern" UI which hides half of the functionality
* Spaces went away from their usual pricing model - even if you self host you have to pay reccuring fee or it doesn't work.
* In Youtrack you pay for maintenance/updates as before, but service desk addon is again hard subscription for no good reason.
* AI is yet another subscription - in this case it's understandable, but further normalises paying each month.
Seems like their old, reasonable management had their bodies stolen by ghosts of VC bros.
It definitely doesn't know the whole context of my project, or that it should use xyz imports to achieve a specific task from the same project.
It will get better with time I am sure.
I read through the privacy policy and other policies ahead of time too, nothing concerning for what I am doing. Is backed by OpenAI.
* https://www.jetbrains.com/help/ai/data-collection-and-use-po...
* https://www.jetbrains.com/legal/docs/terms/jetbrains-ai/serv...
To be fair, it's not possible to uninstall any 'bundled' plugin, like Node.js plugin in Webstorm. But for AI assistant they could make an exception: make it installed by default, but no bundled, so that users could uninstall it completely.
By default, it's offline, so no privacy worries. Secondly, it works really well for me. It really does suggest what I'm about to write more often than not.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irresistible_force_paradox
This is the sort of thing that makes me reconsider using Jetbrains at all, even though I prefer it to VScode. Enshittification rarely reverses once it starts...
Not that I really disagree with the premise though. IntelliJ has not gotten any better with every update for a few years, but it does get slower and slower.
Jetbrains in general is really poor at dealing with user feedback. My pet issue (showing the path in search results and tabs, so you don't just have a bunch of index.js files that you can't tell apart) has been ignored for years despite consistent votes and comments.
Hm. I didn't know there was an installed-per-default assistant. Maybe it's disabled if your workplace uses Copilot?
I use Rider, WebStorm, Datagrip, CLion (and occasionally Android Studio) and haven't had this thing thrown in my face yet. The "new UI" can go diaf though.
It unfortunately doesn’t appear that it is. I downgraded my Jetbrains IDEs because AI Assistant kept trying to clobber over my other tools, even when disabled.
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/wiki/Extensions-Compati...
I was surprised when it showed-up out of nowhere during the latest update.
The problem is very simple: AI and cloud solutions can be VERY problematic in certain domains.
Read: A deeply undesirable liability.
We had the same problem when Altium decided to take their Altium Designer electronics CAD products and pretty much force everyone into having this cloud-based layer in the tool. No. Thanks. We cannot do that. At all. After decades with Altium, we switched to KiCad. Works fine for the vast majority of designs, even fairly sophisticated work. More importantly, the cloud-based liability is gone. For anything else --which has been very rare-- we have older non-cloud releases of AD we can use.
Don't shove AI or cloud onto your customers. Let them choose. Some can't risk it at all. AI-generated code might sound fantastic to some. While, in other circles, it opens the door to untold liability. I don't want that shit to even show-up without a very explicit installation of a feature, plug-in, extension or whatever. It needs to be conclusively and demonstrably separable.
Also, always remember customers have options. Be careful. We are actually considering moving away from JetBrains tools for this very reason. For now, we'll wait and see. More specifically, we'll wait and see if all semblance of AI is removed from the tools by default and only available as an explicitly installed extension. I have to be able to have tools audited (in a legal context) and show that AI was not a part of the process.
For us, this does not add value. It adds liability.
Well that's some obvious PR bullshit; clearly the feature needs deep integration to work, but I don't believe for a second that it's doing so in any way other than hooking into Jetbrains' core API.
The notion that a novelty feature from the last couple of years needs to be implemented in such a way as to render it impossible to remove from a 20 year old IDE is patently absurd.
Should've been a plugin in the first place.
Anyone know what version this starts? 2024.1?
You can't remove Chuckles after disabling - that was a decision to go against the default setup of plugins - and shows the respect they have for users.
It's like The Cat Came Back - this annoyance is going to run and run.