Hacker News Reader

>"You have to log in, accept the data policies and either purchase a subscription or start a trial."

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.

You do not have to pay for a subscription for their IDEs. You can pay just once and get that version of the IDE forever plus a period of updates. Or, use the community edition and pay nothing.

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).

>You can pay just once and get that version of the IDE forever plus a period of updates. Or, use the community edition and pay nothing.

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.

> 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.

> nit: there is no community edition of Rider as of now (nor CLion from what I saw a few years ago. Could have changed)

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

> 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 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

> The "AI" service consumes real resources

My disk space is a real resource as well

>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.

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.

"are easily disproven by a quick read of the article". Some people don't have the room to trust that it will always and flawless not do those things from their security needs. You're right most people don't care and probably won't be affected, but the "probably" is not acceptable for everyone.

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.

On the other hand, how is the AI plugin different from any other web connected plugin / service in the IDE? Some of this has to come down to being realistic about the choice you made when you bought into a proprietary (even if very well polished and highly useful) software. Either you trust that their software isn't arbitrarily sending your private code and information off or you don't. If you don't, you either firewall the app from outgoing connections or you don't use the app at all. Either way I don't see why the addition of a new feature and service suddenly changes how likely you think they are to be sending off your private code.

Because other plugins don't have "sending code to third-party AI service" as their actual, advertised feature. This one does. And the "sending code to third-party AI service" part is something of a hot topic in enterprise these days, across many organizational levels.

Honestly, I'm more worried about malice from plugins that aren't specifically intended to send my source off-site.

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.

> 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.

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.

This plugin is 'bundled' which means it can't be uninstalled. There are examples of widely used plugins supported by JetBrains that are not bundled, for example IdeaVim. They could suggest installing AI plugin as part of install/upgrade process, but not bundle it, like they do for IdeaVim. In that case everyone would be happy.

It can be disabled - I disabled it and many other plugins I dont use to speed up IDE

Disabled but not uninstalled. That's what people are asking for.

This is like one of those cheap phones that you can't uninstall Facebook on.

Cheap phones lack storage space. Disabling the plugin does not really inconvenience you in any real way besides annoying you with the fact that it’s there

> 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.

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.

You’re right but also keep in mind that company policies are often made without much thought. I can totally see a BigCorp making a policy that no AI clients are to be installed on their machines, regardless if the functionality is turned off

You're right but also keep in mind that companies do make decisions like that with thought or are contractually bound by the work they do for this, e.g. defense work, proprietary secrets that if they got out would far exceed the cost of the requirements

> 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

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.

>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.

Quite honestly if I got a popup like that from any text editor I would never use it again.

>If you seeing this (and I’m not, particularly, but let’s pretend for a moment you are); maybe AI has an image problem.

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.

> I mean, HN is a reasonable forum.

not how I would describe HN.

How would you describe it?

It's a safe space for people with money to express opinions that would otherwise get them excoriated.

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.

They have added a small local-only model that runs directly on your machine to try and do smarter autocompletion. The model only runs if your machine is considered powerful enough to provide a sensibly fast experience. Nothing ever leaves your computer. I was equally confused, then I found all these details somewhere in their documentation.

as it always goes article coming out in 4-6 months … “due to a bug introduced in version x…x…x we have found that we DID enabled AI by default and that we DID ingest every line of code from every project world-wide and that you DID NOT have to subscribe or sign-up for training for this to happen and that it DID happen without your consent. Our bad…

> as it always goes

What are the other previous examples of this?

here’s one… https://apnews.com/article/google-incognito-mode-tracking-la...

Who is to say that this does not change one day? Look at how leading products such as MSFT Teams is managed.

> Who is to say that this does not change one day?

Surely that can be said of any software - even those without any current AI stub functionality?

Yup, and hate it all there too.

Hate what? The possibility that it might change one day?

I'm confused.

I hate that it has happened before and that it very likely will happen again. I just hope Jetbrains isn't a future example.

"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 software

that can be said of any proprietary software with call-home functionality

I use Goland. The article says the plugin is not "enabled by default", but that's only because its functionality is locked behind a subscription. The plugin is enabled by default, I have to manually go into the settings to disable it so that I stop receiving notifications about having to update the plugin (which I'm not even using since I don't have a subscription). Jetbrains has documentation showing how to disable it [1]. It was enabled by default.

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...

The problem is we've all seen this pattern before.

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.

When have we seen that pattern before?

Facebook and Microsoft Windows come to mind.

Also, companies making opt-in features silently into opt-out ones.

Features that require quite sizeable server resources?

Microsoft Edge comes to mind

Amazon Prime and any other service that went from "free with ads" and "paid ad-free" to adding a "paid with ads" and "pay even more to remove the ads you used to have removed".

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.

It's a frontend for the OpenAI API. So while IntelliJ might not use your data, OpenAI might.

Chat gpt generated explanatory/historical filler around news is a plague

having recently re-installed Jetbrains Rider, not once did I ever get the impression that the AI portion was unable to be opted out of. It was one of the first things I do (I also disable source control plugins).

Agreed that's false outcry. It is annoying because of its updates and the fact that it shows prominently in the UI at first start. But that pretty much all unless you activate it which I tested when it was in beta and require indeed that you agree to those agreements and log in.

Agreed. I really don’t understand how upset people are. Do you think they want to give you a free AI service? From a business perspective, AI is an opportunity for a brand new revenue stream. It’s certainly not free for the company to develop and operate either.

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.