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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone using any of JetBrains AI offerings? I feel like they are burning piles of money on areas I never hear anyone talking about using. The only thing I ever used was their AI plugin, tried Junie once, but the rest just seems like noise I dont care about.

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They are fighting for survival, hence why they are all here promoting a product that no one really wants but vaguely seems interesting with their barely used HN accounts. Might take a while for them to realize they are largely irrelevant and don't control the key aspects of the tech which is a deal breaker for most (can't used claude paid plans). They need to find a better pivot and likely shed a whole boatload of employees.

Rider was my IDE for years until they started pushing their AI tools while not letting you bring your own models. Then it seems they listened to the complaints and for a while I could use Codex but then the next update took it away. So I ran out of patience and switched to VS Code, and that was the end of JB and my dear Rider for me.

Hey, JetBrains team here:

What is the problem with using Codex in Rider, can you please share? It's generally available, with your own Codex subscription or via JetBrains AI.

PyCharm and RustRover. It is astonishing no other IDEs have offered direct competition. I would prefer a faster/lighter alternative to my tablet, but none exists.

edit: Sorry; misread. No, and I am very confused by their diaspora of AI offerings!

Imo vscod(ium) with pyrefly LSP is miles better than Pycharm today. Never used rust rover but rust-analyser LSP also worked great for me. Interesting which features of jetbrains IDEs do sell it for you

I don't have a good direct comparison to that, but broadly:

  - Natural treatment of multi-file projects
  - Introspection
  - Refactoring
  - Keyboard shortcuts, specific types of search etc
  - The build/run windows

Overall, it feels like JB treats the core units as languages and multi-file projects, while others, including VsCode, treat it as text files. Whenever I try something else, I look for these features, assume I'm doing something wrong, then come to an understanding that no one else does them to the same degree. For example, Zed has no concept of moving items. I don't know if VsCode does, but whenever I try that, it seems to have only superficial ability to introspect on function calls, data structures etc.

The only IDE that compares in my eyes is Visual Studio, which to outsiders might seem weird, but when they support something they do a pretty good job.

I use Rider and DataGrip regularly. I also use WriterCide,

DataGrip is seriously under-rated, IMO.

As far as I know, you don't need DataGrip if you already have Rider. The same functionality is already inside Rider.

I like a completely separate tool for managing databases.

I mean, I use DataGrip, but their AI specific tools is what I'm wondering about.

Ah. I don't rate how JetBrains have gone about it. It feels like things have moved around a lot, and it seems too complicated, with too many AI "thingies" sprinkled around without much explanation. And the inline, auto-suggested change can vary from "useful, please do that", to "will you stop flashing up all this shit everywhere I look!".

For a while I used Junie for small refactorings, and it generally does a good job, quite quickly. A couple of times I tried asking it for more complex things, and it didn't do well. I do find the UI to be a bit tricky, so it's quite possible I did something wrong or didn't add something to the context I was supposed to. Hopefully they sort out the "AI Chat" panel soon.

But now I use Codex/ChatGPT... and what it can do is frankly incredible. And it might just be me, but I do like having my AI chat UI completely separate from my IDE.

I agree on DataGrip and use its MCP weekly.

I used to use datagrip, but one of my first "vibe code" experiments was to create a datagrip replacement for myself ( https://github.com/keithn/sql ) that worked better for the kinds of things I did, a lightning fast tui, but then I stopped using that and now just use claude mostly.

I use Junie at work and I have to say I'm not amazed by it. Plus I cannot run it inside an Alpine Linux VM which is annoying as all the other agents I tried worked just fine.

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