JetBrains is shutting down "Code With Me" in all its IDEs

Good, Jetbrains desperately need to focus. I love their offerings, but I can see their value rapidly evaporating as Claude code/agents eats their lunch.

Meanwhile you can’t open a project’s git worktree without requiring a full and complete reindex - a complete non-starter in larger monorepos. Their shared index offering is a complete joke, and generally it just feels like the wheels are coming off their product somewhat.

> Code With Me was a tool designed for real-time pair programming and remote collaboration

It regrettably makes sense: Nowadays a lot of people are instead asking an LLM chatbot to "collaborate." It may be inferior to a coworker--perhaps dangerously subtly so--but you can invoke it at any time which is convenient.

I used it a couple of times to write code alongside a dev when I was working with a client who had their own dev team. It never worked well for us, mostly because I use the vim extension and it seemed absolutely incapable of translating typical vim usage to "normal" actions. Trying to write just a couple lines of code would lock the IDE for both of us, or shift things around at the bottom (like the "editing a word document" meme) and leave incomplete changes in weird places (aka sneaky compiler errors).

This was more than a year ago, so they hopefully had fixed it by now, but we gave up after a few sessions.

If anyone out there is looking for an alternative, you should try Tuple: https://tuple.app/ (disclaimer: I work there). When you need to actually get stuff done with other humans, we think Tuple is the best way to do that. If you're interested, you can hit me up for a free month: eli@tuple.app

If anyone need a replacement I suggest https://mob.sh/

It's a git based system where you use a common screen sharing between participants and since It's git based, everyone can use it's IDE.

It's based on the mob programming technique coined by Woody Zuill so no multiple people editing at the same time and more discutions

Source: https://blog.jetbrains.com/platform/2026/03/sunsetting-code-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47397747)

That’s sad news, I used plenty of times when working in group projects. It was quite useful when we were all working at home and someone got stuck on something and wanted to discuss it. We quickly jumped on a call and shared the ”code with me” invite. Do they have a alternative to this now? Or are we forced to switch to vscode liveshare in such instances?

This is such a shame. It was the single best code pairing tool for the longest time and did not rely on mere screen sharing.

No one even codes alone anymore.

Joking aside, maybe collaborative coding with AI will save coding? You're still prompting but immersed in the code and inline annotations, rather than a blindfolded chat. I know copilot did it before but we're still waiting to see the end shape of AI coding and maybe someone comes up with a new take?

Switched to Claude Code a while ago and barely open a traditional IDE anymore. Features like "Code With Me" made sense before AI coding tools existed. Hard to see how JetBrains competes on collaboration features when the whole development workflow is shifting.

I stopped using JetBrains a couple years ago. VS Code is completely free and has improved quite a lot in recent years. IMO JetBrains should focus on doing one thing right rather than having so many products.

It never really worked well in Rider, but I really wanted to use it more. Such a great tool to do some (remote) pair programming and perform a shared debugging session.

This is a shame - while I never used it, it always looked like the way I would have wanted to remotely collaborate.