Breaking down JetBrains' complex AI agent strategy

leaddev.com

9 points·chhum··3 comments

> AI is a great tool, and it’s changing how we build software. But it’s not magic — especially not free, unlimited magic. As professionals, we should understand how it works, how much it costs, and how to use it better. In the real world, speed and cost matter as much as quality. We believe that’s where the industry is heading. So let’s face it and start mastering these together

This sounds unnecessarily condescending given that JetBrains failed to price their own product correctly.

I thunk they're in a real bind. One thing is the product strategy is a mess—I'm guessing that internally they just don't really have product people and with something like AI, which is cross--cutting, that's really hard to manage. They are also in a bind because everyone is loosing money on LLM tools, and Anthropic, for example, make Cluade Code and can charge JetBrains and the other vendors whatever they like. If you don't have deep pockets you then have to pass the cost on, but that hits your biggest customers hardest, which then pushes your users to the competitor product; It's a pretty tough spot. MS buying GitHub when they did looks more and more like a bargain!

i loved Jetbrains as an IDE but gosh they've fumbled the AI strategy.

The article doesn't mention AI assistant plugin which I think was their first attempt.

Junie cannot run local models, so for that you'll have to go back to AI assistant which leaves a lot to be desired.

I was excited about them adoption ACP with editors like Zed. will help standardize the space a little with the interoperability, but as it stands they're really behind in this race.

quick note to article author if they see this:

> Junie runs on ChatGPT-5

need to drop the Chat.

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