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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Nobody is going to acquire JetBrains at a crazy premium to remove a competitor or to stay a competitor themselves. OpenAI/Microsoft/Google/Meta will.

The valuations are based on trillionish dollar companies fighting over startups.

Honestly it's a little odd JetBrains doesn't seem to be chasing this fad much at all.

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Jetbrains has "AI Assistant" and "Junie" (the latter is much like "Claude Code"). Junie is a great AI coding assistant, seems to be on par with Claude Code (and can use Anthropic models e.g. Claude Sonnet, or other models).

Also, Claude Desktop can be configured to serve Jetbrains MCP Server, which will let Claude Desktop (or any other coding AI/LLM) connect and control Jetbrains IDEs, including changing project configuration, listing / finding files, editing files, looking at VCS diffs.

So I believe Jetbrains is addressing the AI coding assistant market, they're not making as much noise and perhaps they should be ... feature-wise I think Jetbrains IDEs + AI integrations will be as good, in the long term, as other systems. At least I hope so, because I can't let go of PyCharm, Webstorm, IntelliJ IDEA, Goland, et al

> they're not making as much noise and perhaps they should be

Jetbrains isn't a silicon valley startup and isn't raising money, so no VC is going to make a 10x return by hyping them. That sadly usually means that you are shut out from the conversation no matter how good your product is.

See further: Aider.

They are a big company that has taken a lot of investment over the years. They make good stuff and their audience (a lot of them developers) LOVE the product - willing to pay their own money for them. Rather than complain that they're shut out of the system we all apparently don't like, shouldn't we celebrate that they're making it with an alternative approach?

Good. I use their stuff or at least I'm starting to use it more, and I don't want them acquired and enshittified.

I've had a Jetbrains license for years. I barely use their stuff now. Cursor is much less capable IDE but better coding environment. At first I'd use them both on the same thing but now it's all Cursor.

Exact same here. I love PHPStorm for Laravel dev, but I’ve barely used it in months. Meanwhile I’m paying $100+ per month to Cursor for subscription + premium model usage. And honestly I kinda hate Cursor as an editor / IDE. I really hope Junie is good enough to switch back, but I won’t give up integrated AI agentic coding in my editor if it’s not.

Is it really better than VS Code with GitHub Copilot though? I kinda doubt it

They’re not even in the same category.

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