Show HN: First background agents in Jetbrains IDEs [video]
youtube.com
Howdy - I’m Kevin, co-founder of Firebender, and we built the first background coding agent in android studio / Jetbrains!
Why not just use Cursor background agents or OpenAI Codex?
Both of these require setting up a cloud container and cloning your existing developer environment, and maintaining it. Then when you want to iterate on changes as AI inevitably makes a mistake, you either throw away the work, or have to pull down the branch and clean it up. This feels really clunky. With Firebender, background agents run locally in a lightweight git worktree/IDE tab. This means when the agent is done, you can easily clean up the changes and run code with a few clicks.
Under the hood, the agent behaves similarly to claude code (didn’t want to reinvent the wheel), but also leverages all of the hooks into IntelliJ sdk like go-to-definition, find usages, auto-imports for accuracy, and it gives a cleaner visual UI for reviewing changes and merging them. You can use any frontier model like gpt-5/sonnet-4 as the base.
We’ve had to do quite a bit of reverse engineering of the IntelliJ codebase to cleanly set up and manage the isolated environment, and I think you’ll appreciate the simple UX of hitting cmd+enter to run a background agent anywhere.
get started docs: https://docs.firebender.com/get-started/background-agents
download the plugin: https://firebender.com
Would love to get your feedback to help us improve the tool for you! Thanks!