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Comment by happytiger | Hacker News Reader

What blows my mind is that you can’t disable it. It’s fine to include features, but perhaps the feature should be optional and you should see if it gets adoption before making it a default? Doesn’t seem at all user centric for a development tools company to operate so anti-common sense.

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.

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It possible to disable this plugin. I have it disabled.[1]

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.

I'm not saying this is perfect and this can obviously still be a problem on e.g work devices.

[1] https://imgur.com/ETyFlCZ

[2] https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/LLM-1760/Can-not-remove...

[3] https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/LLM-1760/Can-not-remove...

On release, IIRC, disabling it did not work persistently, ostensibly due to a combination of bugs, so a lot of people found that especially egregious.

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.

Yeah, I mean a plugin is called a plugin because it should also be possible to plug it out easily?

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...

People are probably more worried about the 'AI' training itself on the code that's sent to it and then showing snippets to everyone else that tries to do something similar.

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.

You can absolutely disable it. I did when I first saw it. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/disable-ai-assistant.htm...

.noai

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...

Do you know if this disables things like Copilot? I just want to disable the JetBrains AI... not the one I'm already paying for.

> want to disable the JetBrains AI... not the one I'm already paying for.

If you’re not paying for it, it’s not on. You can also disable the entire plugin from plugin settings if you want.

Some repos are more dotfile than source file these days.

You only need that if you want to ensure no other developer uses the AI features of JetBrains, the plugin doesn't do anything until you pay them / activate a trial.

It's just a naked money grab. It's another subscription revenue stream and it's clear they were desperate to get their half-baked solution in to compete with Copilot and ChatGPT.

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).

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