JetBrains really needs to support alternatives fast. Cursor, CoPilot, etc all need much better integration. VS Code is becoming almost mandatory for companies that force the use of LLM tools.
They do support offline models: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/ai-assistant/switching-to-off...
I also used the Continue.dev plugin for a bit which worked nicely with Ollama but was buggy when it comes to the UI, their AI Assistant feels better in that regard: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/22707-continue
Sadly seems like their Junie tool doesn't support that yet, would be pretty cool to have that convenience instead of needing something like Aider or other tools for more complex multi-step edits: https://www.jetbrains.com/junie/
Jetbrains and existing IDEs are much more focused for exactly what it is, manual code writing/inspection. How they integrate AI should be done meaningfully to improve the IDE experience. If they want to be in the business of reinventing code-writing, then you have to scrap the IDE altogether.
It’s an interesting question whether we’ll need an IDE at all in the future. I used to program in Vim with minimal help. Maybe one day I’ll program in Vim with maximal help from an AI. It would be nice to say "find where authentication happens" and it pulls up all instances of auth code. But that’s also another example of a feature that can go into an IDE: case sensitive search, regex search, natural language search. So I’m skeptical we won’t be using IDEs in the future. And if all of this is a part of an IDE, then that’s squarely in Jetbrains’ wheelhouse.
I was specifically looking for companies that required IDE integration with Cursor, not companies that require developers to, at minimum, seek AI counsel in a browser tab while they're developing in their IDE.