And I would vastly prefer that they focus on robust IDE features than yet another bunch of "Now with AI" crap duct taped to their products.
Way too many tools force their shitty AI (API wrapper) upon me already. And i have yet to see any benefit.
(I don't just want to hear what everyone says; I specifically I want to hear what JetBrains lovers think about this.)
I was about to go all in on JetBrains becaue I can't stand VSCode, and about to transition from ChatGPT only to trying out in-IDE integrations... but if there's a better thing to try first... all ears.
Their own offering, "Jetbrains AI" absolutely SUCKS (just read the reviews, you'll see why).
Third-party AI plugins are pretty basic. Most just offer inline completions and a chat sidebar. For example, GitHub Copilot for Intellij is a shell of itself: No agent capabilities, or even model switching (although that seems to be coming in a future update).
Generally speaking, Jetbrains seems to have missed the AI code editor revolution, and are now trying to play catch-up. The problem is that their plugin API seems to offer less capabilities than VS-Code when it comes to implementing advanced AI features (think of cursor like features). This, combined with the fact that Intellij products are closed source and can't simply be forked by someone who requires additional capabilities, makes it hard for third parties to build advanced AI features.
PS: I also tested their new "Agent" plugin called Junie (invite only beta). It's really basic (like 30% as good as cursors agent mode), but since it's still in invite only beta this should be taken with a grain of salt.
https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community is Apache 2.0
Only some of the language plugins are proprietary.
As someone who doesn't use AI all that much: what else does an IDE need besides an inline prompt and a ChatGPT window to the side? I've played around with the continue.dev plugin and I can't think of anything else I'd want out of AI assistants with the quality they're at at the moment.
> GitHub Copilot for Intellij is a shell of itself
That's on Github, to be honest. And to be expected. It doesn't make much sense for Microsoft to fund a plugin for a competitor's IDE when they already have their own IDEs to sell.
> Intellij products are closed source
They follow the same protocol Microsoft uses: the core is open, but some language plugin features are proprietary. For Microsoft, the proprietary part is just the C# debugger at this point, whereas IntellJ has a whole bunch of paid-for plugins that are closed-source. Still, you can fork the community edition of IntelliJ should you wish.
However, I have to say that it's a bit buggy, some things like running together with the SonarQube plugin breaks it, other times UI elements for keyboard shortcuts just hang around on the screen when they shouldn't be visible/present. There's a good deal of stuff in their issue tracker: https://github.com/continuedev/continue/issues?q=is%3Aissue%...
That said, I had a pretty good experience with the GitHub Copilot plugin, as long as you're willing to pay for it.
If you're transitioning from ChatGPT pastes to an IDE integration, I would recommend a trial of Cursor. They have acquired SuperMaven, and the autocomplete feature is mostly appropriate and useful. I think the chat-diff-review-apply workflow really tightens and accelerates the feedback loop, as well as the ability to submit an error from the terminal to the chat session with a single click. People say good things about the Compose and Agent features, but I haven't so far been drawn to them to explore.