JetBrains reported a net financial loss first time in its tracked history
helgilibrary.com
helgilibrary.com
Reads like aimlessly burning whatever they felt they were able to burn without existential risk on some "also ran" LLM sinkhole.
In other words: nothing to see here, same as everybody else.
Negative cash flow from investing means that some prior investment has been shown to be worth far less than they paid for it.
I've always been a JB fan. But the last few updates have been quite rough, and they really don't seem to have worked out the AI thing at all.
No idea why they thought they can compete with frontier AI labs on that, it's entirely waste of money
They also tried to push AI feature set as a separate subscription which is just insane in current tooling market.
All users wanted is good integration of multi-AI providers in their base offering. I think they are slowly shifting to that but that's a lot of money wasted already
...or they're bailing out of really bad investments before they become even worse ones...
You're suggesting "investing" is like R&D?
Investing is when you buy stocks or bitcoin and hope. Except for 1 year, their "investments" have always lost, last year about 50% of total assets:
-908 -4,374 3,970 -1,946 -10,273
"Investing" is traditionally how money is skimmed: something's sold to a friend at an inflated price that only becomes recognized as such years later amidst some other cover/crisis (if not after a statute of limitations). The other option is sweetheart deals - unneeded property leases, jobs for friends, etc. - but those are a bit more traceable, while investments can have multiple shell-company layers and complex derivatives.
I still use Visual Studio in my day job, where Claude's output while VERY helpful, requires my ownership of everything, meaning I am inspecting every single line it changes. If a change is bigger than I think it should, I kill it before I commit.
I know I don't HAVE to use an IDE for that, but if the change is small enough, I am faster than asking Claude to understand the subtext behind my personal context of the product, and the IDE is supremely helpful for making a quick change across a handful of files.
I think this is changing fast. Pressure is increasing on devs for output, and most devs I know are no longer inspecting lines. I have devs in my business unit who claim to not have looked at code for months, except on certain rare occasions. I am not a developer and this week I've been given access to the repo to build my own apps and extensions. There's a "review" between commit and deploy, but there's no chance the Tech Lead can manually review everything, so that's getting done by AI too.
I know this horrifies a lot of devs, but these tools are shockingly good and we are not seeing an increase in bugs. In fact our automated detections (also AI assisted) are reducing the number of customer reported critical bugs.
I really think the days of inspecting every line are over.
> I am inspecting every single line it changes.
Honestly, when I'm looking at ClaudeCode's output 75% of time i'm doing it to learn and understand and not just check for correctness. I'm confident enough to admit I don't know everything and I've learned a lot from reading Claude's code.
Basically they give you a way to view the code the llm has generated/changed easily, annotate that code for the llm, and manage multiple agents and at once.
Heavy user of WebStorm and Datagrip since at least 2019.
> ...inspecting...
I got used to sublime merge to context-switch editing vs reviewing, staging changes line-by-line
I've tried it, and it seemed fine, but not compelling enough to even spend the free usage I get with my All Products Pack.
Junie is boring, and that's perfect (for me).
The Jetbrains integration is nice, but if you rely on the tool you're probably not going to use the IDE much anyway.
It is alright to get an LLM review on code I write myself, but getting extra tokens is expensive, and it was not clear if I could configure it to use one of the API keys I have from GLM, MiMo, etc.
I tried Air as well. It was alright, but I found it a bit more cumbersome to use then Pi. I tried configuring Pi to be accessed though ACP, but it felt like going through a hoop to have a worse experience. Then again, I am not someone that manages multiple agents in parallel, at most I have one agent implementing something in a different repository while I am doing my own things.
Air could maybe be useful for me if I could plug in the LLMs I actually use directly, it is too tied to ChatGPT, Claude, etc.
I would like to see one more ide-integrated, like I think running commands like ‘grep’ with the shell is really for the birds (creates a risk that some other command line might be run, the wrong files might be accessed, all that) and rather there should be a specialized toolbox.
[1] … I reject vibe coding. Token costs be damned but I always like to have a talk before it starts like “I think…, maybe you should…, does this make sense?, do you have any questions for me before you start?” and later “what are you doing in the code in the selection?”
Wonder what the "something big" could be that companies are throwing money into in 2026.
Because traders are short-sighted and demand the profit line always goes up.
They're also horrifyingly risk-averse. A temporary dip in profit because money is being spent on expanding is a negative signal to them.
I regret someone convincing me not to buy TSMC stock about 5 years ago because of their high CapEx. I would have 5x'd my money since then.
IIRC investments are any transactions which increase the assets in the balance sheet. Losses are outflows net of inflows.
In abstract terms, one is about stock and the other about flow of spend.
If AI continues to be improving then it's reasonable to assume most people won't need a full blown IDE.
I firmly believe JetBrains would have a better chance of survival if they stopped chasing the AI hype and got back to work on their IDEs, accepting the fact that they'll have less users than before. Right now, they're completely lost.
Probably AI spend and increased developer cost (salary + AI subscription cost). And the increase in memory prices means procuring IT assets has sky-rocketed too.
I would assume the margins they operated on, evaporated with the AI bubble.
Now it's Claude Code and ever so occasionally Codex.
I never do work in IDEs by hand anymore. I stopped writing code entirely in February and I will likely never write code again unless my internet dies.
I need a JetBrains-level AST navigator that focuses on high level code navigation and understanding, and moreover on code and architectural review. I need to quickly scan diffs and quickly see architecture at a glance.
Of course even that too many eventually fall away.
I rarely open RustRover these days. I could never have predicted that.
I don't even remember the last time I opened them, I cancelled my All Products pack this year.
The advantage it had over vscode was always the better language features and the familiar UI.
None of that is useful to me in AI based workflows. Some might still disagree, but the manual development workflow using an IDE is clearly dying.
JetBrain's revenue will obviously crater as a result, particularly when slower enterprise licenses follow.
If you've been on HN long enough you recognize that the OP is quite prolific in making absurd claims about AI: infamously predicted that children would be making professional, Hollywood level films by the end of 2025, and is now spending their time building the 5000th barely functional clone of Adobe tools[0]. It's probably a little unfair, but they are bold claims from someone who really does not have the ground to be making bold claims.
Half of HN hates AI.
A large percentage thinks that the current status quo is how things will look over the next decade. They don't think everything is fundamentally and irreversibly changing.
Nobody is coming out of this with the same career. The whole world is being rewired. Some people really don't like that.
I'm just glad we're out of the web platform / cellphone incrementalism era. I wish more of my career could have been spent with this rocket fuel. It's dangerous and hypergolic, but it's fun and flashy and capable of pulling us out of this gravity well.
Yes. Companies have been looking at nothing but revenue for over 10 years now. You realize that a sustainable company has to look at net profit at some point?
Personally I usually use Claude inside the Jetbrain's IDE terminal, even if I code by hand obviously less. I still like using the diff, navigation, quick access to any file path for my prompt etc but maybe that won't last.
(edit: although I currently use an old perpetual fallback license because I didn't like the last price increase especially as they slowly remove what I like in the UI)
I have seen a bubble sort function in a PR from an engineer with 10 years of experience. Meanwhile sort from standard library is easily available with one single line.
The bar has become as low as "it works" without considering what's in the code or whether the entire feature should even exist at all.
P.S. that same engineer sent out a PR of 200-file feature. The PR is so large that it freezes the latest MacBook Pro if you try to read it. Nobody reviewed it and he merged it himself. Nobody uses that feature, and nobody in the teams wants to maintain it. Now we are considering scrapping it.
So it's already an improvement. Should it be manually read, comprehended, reviewed? Probably. But they can get to an improvement over what they did 2 years ago, with basically no effort. And then they can get a little bit further, with massive effort?
The "LLM-yolo" is a big knee in the cost/benefit curve. It's an improvement over their "old code". The only drawback is: it's still containing bugs, and now no one understands them. But that's not hitting them until that code has aged somewhat, so a year or two down the line.
Quality, maintainability, simplicity, understandability, flexibility etc all still matter at $DAY_JOB, where you’ve got paying customers. We’ve got a responsibility to write good software that adds to people’s lives.
I’d recommend to try to raise the bar. Commit messages written by humans, no PRs above a certain size, any PR needs an introduction / explanation by author first for the reviewers.
The word professional im important here. I don't want to know, how unprofessional devs handle their craft.
Follow up work to generate markdown? It wrote a mess of manual string building instead of using said library lol. Even with strong AGENTS.md guidance around using existing and leading community libraries they will often take a hard left and write stdlib straight into your repo.
Y'all should scrap that feature and maybe the engineer. I believe the Shopify CEO recently referred to those types of PR as "slop grenades" that cause headaches for everyone else..
When you get paid to care, you will care. Unfortunately, no one cares, they just want results, any result. Bubble sort will do, especially for low volume tasks.
Use the time you save by not caring, to do other fun stuff.
They've also done so many pivots on AI, all of them weakly and annoyingly done. They couldn't even pull of FiTM copilot well, they were super late on it and it had all sort of bugs.
They could have just taken the loss and written an amazing GUI coding agent that integrated well with their IDE -- amazing integrations with their refactorings, etc. -- but that played well in other people's ecosystems but they refused and tried to own the whole pipe. Or something. They just confused me.
Their latest attempt is to allow you to connect to and run other people's agent harnesses inside the IDE and it works well enough but it wasn't enough to grab me since I (like you) use herdr on another machine to do the coding.
I've been using their products since ~IDEA 3.x. Almost my entire 25+ year career really. My fingers are wedded to their keystrokes.
I'm paid to create a product. If Claude does so without me having to look at the code, then that's what I'm being paid to do.
This of course varies by company but this is clearly where it's headed: bot pushes, bot reviews, you look at the PR title and click merge.
Since the spring, I haven't actually needed to write the code, just look at it and make sure it's good.
All that I do from inside GitHub or GitLab.
I've had a JetBrains subscription forever and this is the first time I'm considering not renewing it.
So presumably your workflow is, agent tui -> push -> review -> find problems -> agent tui -> push?
Care to share any code or features that have come of your workflow? I'm skeptical of the quality and complexity this approach can handle.
Oh, boy, here we go... Sighs and pulls up a chair.
Using an IDE has nothing to do with looking at code. The best engineers I've ever known use what JetBrains aficionados would refer to as "editors", not full-blown IDEs. To a person, not one of them felt as though they were missing anything they wanted or needed. I would probably even say "Unix is my IDE". I have a terminal chock-full of advanced command line tools to search and manipulate codebases. It's always fun and convenient when a GUI gives easy access to those things, but it's just that: a convenience, and only when the GUI exposes the full option set of the underlying tool, which they almost never do. Basically, I can alt-tab to a terminal, press up-arrow to expose "cargo build", and hit enter to run it, about as easily as someone else can select the build menu in an IDE. Further, if that build menu option is any less configurable than Cargo.toml, I'd prefer the text config any day. And finally, "cargo build" works with any editor I'm using that day, even if they don't their own build system wrappers.
IDEs are fine for people who enjoy them. I grind my teeth whenever anyone hints that they're remotely necessary for, well, anything, or that people who aren't using them are somehow missing out on something. We know what we're missing, and frankly, we're not missing it.
At this point of 2026, if you're reading code and still catching things, then the problem was before the code was written. You should have decided more high level preferences like invariants before the work began.
And this is a good thing.
It only fits a hands-on, merely AI-assisted development approach, on one feature at a time, that is not typically productive compared to agentic development.
You might disagree, but you'll find that the proponents of the hands-on approach are losing ground every month as AI gets better at working autonomously.
I still read all the code AI produces, and I have a specific workflow. I scaffold the API first using AI, then review it for quality. Then I write tests, and review them for quality. Implementation is last, and technically I need not review the code but I choose to.
When I’ve done agentic development, the only thing I’ve accomplished is 100x more token burn with lower-quality code. It’s also not faster, because the tokens cost time and so many mistakes are made that must be cleaned up. The agents burn so much time going around in circles, when I could’ve just steered the model to write a good implementation.
Keep in mind, this is very fast. Models still produce thousands of lines of code in mere minutes. And with tests backing them up and an API frozen, the model goes much faster as it can iterate and has a framework for what it’s doing.
There is potential to build a better UI than what's constrained within a CLI's grid of characters.
Claude constantly makes poor architectural decisions, adds unnecessary and costly checks, makes wrong assumptions, etc.
Doesn't take the value out of LLMs writing code, but they need to be properly steered and reasoned with. How will you do so if you don't even browse the code it generates.
I always suspect that the people all in fully agentic codig like this are mostly creating prototypes, half-assed copies of existing products, etc.
I am glad to not work in such an environment.
I mean, sometimes work falls exactly at the tool's strongest suit/match.
I am trying to think of what a comparison here could be but, for example, I remember early days in my career where pretty much 80% of the work was writing boilerplate and using scaffolding/generator tools, plugging them in the various plumbing and pipes of the stack, and just ticking boxes through Jira
Lots of "CRUD" and/or similar "recipe" type of work that was really just turning your brain off and needed that grunt labour force
You may ask: why is the person even needed?
My answer is the same as before: I don't know, I didn't know why were they needed back them either, felt like all could be automated as well, maybe the cost to invest in automating and mapping that all out was never a priority and the ROI math was "good enough" for the business while leadership had other north stars they were worried about?
I've spent 1 month between august and early september writing some of the best code of my life. LLMs only provided feedback, I wrote all the code manually, still remember it by heart.
I was very delighted by the many architectural iterations that led to it. 9 files, around 10k lines of code (of those, 7k tests).
By the end of super funny exercise I kinda realized that if I had the same feature vibe coded it would've been better. I would've done much more and progressed more feature wise.
I just feel stupid hand writing my code.
It doesn't help that I work with stellar individual contributors. All of my team mates (except a junior) are either all former faang or contributed to projects we all use (from the TypeScript compiler to Linux). And they are all abandoning if not spearheading the abandonment of reading code. I'm talking people that truly loved the technical aspect of it and excelled in it.
I just feel stupid, like I'm carrying a weight that I should abandon.
Comments like yours feel would've made sense 6 months ago, but now are crumbling.
Software is essentially so cheap and throwaway nowadays that letting LLMs write it is imperative. When you find your use cases you start reviewing it or rewriting it thoroughly.
I’ve been using agents to do the code for me, but I explicitly tells it to iterate in small changes that I can review and approve as it happens, not after a 2k lines diff. It makes me understand what’s being made, and test every little change before we move on to change other parts of the code. Also helps you correct any misunderstanding right from the start.
Nobody cares how I get there or how ugly the code is. They care how fast I can do it and how reliable the software is.
I look at code sometimes, in down time, to see what's been done terribly by AI, and to fix it and hopefully fix the process so that things don't get done terribly in that particular way in the future.
The AI review stage is where I've found prompting matters a lot more than that initial prototyping phase. I've iterated on prompts and tooling that help the AI keep the codebase clean-ish.
This shouldn't be normalized for you yet unless you're at a faang pushing this at the edge and new to the field, cause this isn't what we used to do 2 years ago.
If you're happy with the ai slop $$$ job more power to you but that isn't the entire field and there used to be (and hopefully still are) good and fun engineering jobs.
Contrary to popular normie belief, no not everyone wants to work at the Metas and OpenAIs and for good reason.
edit: Guys a literal business owner writing code for his own business, christ, what a waste of my time. So instead of hiring actual engineers you try to make it sound like you're employed as a software engineer and your experience is remotely normal. You are the literal business owner not filling seats because you're using AI.
"I'm paid to just shut up and code, baby!"
Yeah, that isn't a real SWE job, bud, don't make comments like you're in the trenches.
I still get to do some coding, where there are safety-critical production systems, but the work is mostly tooling that gets us to that point or supports the business otherwise.
It's an awesome job. Couldn't be funner, pretty much, except on data collection days. I get high level tasks, or come up with my own, and find or build solutions - no more running a whole business, doing production, keeping books, shipping orders, doing customer support - I only do the stuff I like.
And seen that JetBrains revenues still grew 6% YOY, it looks like after all there are still developers paying for an IDE.
I thought that by now, according to the AI kool-aid drinkers, there wouldn't be any developer anymore?
- top-tier language intelligence
- all sorts of applications for building software, from IDEs to task trackers
- a huge, loyal user base
- being big enough to have deals with leading AI providers
They had the potential to lead the AI devtools race. Right now, good but quite basic tools like Pi, Conductor, or Herdr are getting good funding.
But JetBrains just failed to adapt. Their biggest AI attempt – Air – was way worse than Conductor, which is built by a team of few people.
I feel like there are just a few shortsighted people in leadership behind this flop. I will not be surprised if JetBrains will be defunct/shrinked in 5 years.
Zed in particular, from the way it was described upon release, sounded like it should have been a JB competitor. Reality: It can't even move functions or structs!
A year or two ago, I finally gave up:
1. The IDE was simply too slow - notably slower and "heavier" than VS Code in particular - and it seemed to regularly get slower.
2. Bugs - from the complex (TypeScript constructs that tsc itself handles just fine while WebStorm's code analysis kept throwing false positives on) to the trivial and silly (failing to properly handle the <col> tag in React), and often staying open for years.
Meanwhile, VS Code just kept getting better, addressing the complaints I had with it while staying fast.
I work almost exclusively in TypeScript these days; as other commenters pointed out, I'm sure that JetBrains products are still great for other languages.
And their refactoring tools remain second to none. I'm profoundly disappointed in our industry that the VS Code developers apparently looked at JetBrains, with its arsenal of expertly crafted, deterministic, testable refactorings, and said, "Nope, we'd rather make everyone use inherently random language models for anything more complex than Rename Symbol."
For languages like kotlin, java and even python JB is still way ahead of the competition.
The redesign they've gone for also seems like a supremely weird choice. It's like they're trying to be more like VS Code, when their probably biggest selling point was that unlike VS Code, they offered a full and traditional IDE experience.
Their trajectory has been a deeply questionable mix of change for the sake of change and nervously doing what everyone else is doing.
One such thing that Xcode has that IntelliJ doesn’t is per-pane history. In Xcode hitting back/forward navigates history for your focused editor pane whereas IntelliJ’s navigates history across all editor panes.
This might sound like a minor difference, but Xcode’s way gets me to where I want to go more quickly most of the time because I’m not having to wade through the likely-irrelevant history of the other panes. It’s a frequent frustration whenever I have to use an IntelliJ IDE.
Jumping through a stack of functions across classes and back seems like the most common case to me. I'm glad you like it but I would hate that.
Microsoft's stuff is quite good, or you've got a really high bar.
> quite good
Good one.
Microsoft has had a very long reputation (for good reason) for having good developer tooling, even if Windows was not particularly developer friendly...
I heard rumors JetBrains started going downhill around 2022-2023 because they severed ties with employees in Russia's St. Petersburg, which housed their R&D and all (although many employees were relocated but who knows).
Any leverage that claude could benefit from LSPs or language/AST MCPs is undone by that tooling not being able to keep up or stay fresh, so the IDE just "runs hot" for no purpose.
Which means I'm incentivised to close my IDE while claude is working, and now I've got used to not looking at the code.
Like you, I really want a system that works better. I want claude to search and edit through better tooling, it would be faster, more accurate, and should in theory be able to leverage compilers to apply edits better and more accurately.
I don't want claude wasting an awful lot of time grepping for things that a compiler cache can answer, but if that compiler cache can't keep up then it's actively harmful.
I'm sure there must be a better way, there must be a way to have smarter more change-aware cache invalidation, and smarter more cache-aware claude tool use, but so far none has happened.
Long term I'm sure the pairing will emerge, but unfortunately I don't think that's going to come from the IDE vendor side, it'll have to come out of some harness research lab, where Anthropic or a competitor finds a way to reliably leverage this stuff for a speed and accuracy boost.
It's completely bonkers to me that an LLM can almost "natively" read profiler output, but doing so involves vast amounts of text and context ingestion, when there are real tools sitting there that it ignores in preference for either reading vast amounts or iffy python one-shot scripts to parse stuff.
Hi, we have such product already, you can try it here: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/33314-air
With Codex GUI app and Astra you can communicate through screenshosts and collages. WAY faster and more precise for many types of jobs and workflows. Literally just scribble crap into the screens and it knows... no need to write out 50 paragraphs of prose to describe a button and its position.
I was using just command line too and Orca just leveled up everything around it. Still using the cli but inside of Orca. I
To each their own though, I’ve heard great things about Herdr setups.
I'm usually working between VSCode and Codex/Claude Code at the same time, but find myself mostly in latter these days.
Can anything serious/complex be done on mobile? I'm genuinely curious. It's seems bizzare in the context of IDE and tooling discussion.
That slow trickle of back and forth that gets our intelligent machines called "toasters" in a way not predicted by Battlestar Galactica at all, that really starts shining on mobile. Hands off on terms of signing off every little detail, hands on in terms of never being too far out of the loop, keeping the unattended steps small.
They are working on a cli agent; I tried it, but it silently injected hooks into all my other cli agents to re-target JB inference APIs, which caused me to burn through my JB tokens in like two minutes and b0rked all my running agent sessions.
They are working on a spec-driven thing, which I attempted to try but getting burned by the cli thing I abandoned it. It looks really interesting - it's a meta-harness, built and shipped with one of the Spec-Something frameworks, where you define your own specs for your projects, kinda like snake-eating-it-own-tail-of-specs. If spec-driven is The Future, they are at least trying.
There have been a few other things I can't recall, but my observation is that they are taking generative AI seriously as an existential threat, and probably (as another poster here put it) "heating the office burning tokens".
Say what you may, VSCode feels lightweight in comparison despite a lot of plugins (I’m not a VSCode user but I do endure it at work).
Shedding IDE size, decoupling bundled plugins from shipped binaries, and improving file system sync would be great improvements they could do, besides pursuing AI and whatnot.
On a very related note, I'm probably very late to this discussion, but has anyone else noticed autocomplete in JetBrains products has gotten significantly worse after the advent of LLMs? It would previously take into account type signatures and all kinds of context, now it's clearly just a very minimal next token generator, often producing code that doesn't even compile.
I think they've started to realise that and are trying to reign it in with 'Fleet' and 'Code With Me' deprecations.
Don't overestimate the relevance to this.
I also want to have the jetbrains code quality scans automatically ran and fixed, and maybe something that enforces permissions and a sandbox. Basically I want the IDE to be more of a control interface.
In my opinion sunsetting JetBrains Space was a major strategic mistake. It would have given them the moat they currently crave for to compete in the AI space, by enabling cool AI powered features (codex like sandboxes connected to their ides etc...).
All their AI products currently feel like desparate shots in the dark, while Jetbrains Space would have been a natural home, delivering strong value and differentiation.
Once Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode matured and discredited Junie, the next thing i looked for was a code review and CI/CD environment that was as seamlessly integrated to my IDE as possible. I was baffled to discover that JetBrains had just that but decided to sunset it in the midst of the AI war. Absolutely baffling....
I uninstalled the plugin and it continues to open the AI Chat tab to helpfully suggest I install it
I makes me sad. Jetbains used to be a company I looked up to because it always positively surprised me. Now I keep complaining.
I don't get these comments. JetBrains AI assistant supports ClaudeCode, Codex and any ACP harness including OpenCode, in addition to their own. What is it with people saying they're stuck in the JB terminal etc. if they want Claude?
They seem to be very bloated and unable to modernize their product lines.
One of the things we really use heavily is dynamic pipelines, as we have a lot of different stuff.
In teamcity, we had close to 1k build configs, and were able to replace this with about 20 dynamic pipelines in buildkite.
We did need to do a bunch of plumbing, but in this age of AI it means our developers don’t have to rely on devops anymore to get their stuff done to make all this work.
One of the problems was that our devs were “afraid” to alter teamcity build configs, as it all was more fragile than it should be and they were afraid to break stuff.
Teamcity allows for customization with plugins, but all that is so bloated with either Java or Kotlin and requires a shitton of domain specific knowledge to pull off.
Buildkite is much simpler with YAML and their plugin infrastructure which is effectively just hooks into scripts. It’s well designed.
The quality of their software has been falling despite all recurring revenue. I used JetBrains for almost a decade because it just worked. JetBrains Toolbox is some of the worst software I've used, it causes more problems that it solves for me.
Needing to install a different IDE per language is also something I dislike about JetBrains, but not a deal breaker.
Turns out I can easily get by on VS Code / Claude / ChatGPT / Antigravity. DataGrip is going to be hard to replace, but don't need anything more than the current version, hopefully they'll let me keep using it.
It looks like software dev is going the way of natural language as the final spec that humans see. Regardless of whether this is a good idea or not, it’s happening. My boss asked us not to write any code manually starting in Jan, and now has hinted that we should stop reviewing code too.
Natural language as spec obviously has a ton of limitations. And here an opinionated IDE that can define this sort of workflow better is primed to gain a lot of market share, devs clearly aren’t fussed about switching between IDEs right now.
I should be able to, for example, click on a plantuml diagram and see what the endpoint definitions are, See where the request schemas are.
If I have Agents.md files scattered across my codebase I would like my IDE to help me manage them
I am not moving away from JetBrains anytime soon, but it does gets harder to justify when I spend considerable time in a competing offering that has better experience and is free...
I still use their IDE, but I would love to see a realy native view on Claude Code, that actually shows a preview of an image I pasted for instance, in a view that feels native to the IDE.
I don't think the problem is AI itself; they can have AI too, AI as capable as something like Cursor, for example. The issue is that their product is bloated and slow, and much of the technological leadership they once had has been overtaken by VSCode.
I disgree. Use their ide on a 16gb laptop and never had any performance issues. AI is the problem. Openai and anthropic are eating their lunch.
For me, the things that made Jebteains great just don’t matter anymore.
I still use it a lot for reviewing the code.
GitHub or Tuicr for code review. Still waiting for an agentic first review environment- which Jetbrains has missed the ball on.
I have no idea what that contains, but it appears to be a rather large dip, compared to previous years. Overall it's not really that interesting without context and commentary from JetBrains.
My guess is that people aren't abandoning their IDEs. Their market is probably growing. I suspect they're burning money on subsidized inference, just like everybody else.
If engineers are abandoning IDEs then shouldn't they be following the engineers?
They could have bought out Cursor early on too.
Never looked into it further, but might be a factor...
https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/03/11/jetbrains-stateme...
https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/12/06/update-on-jetbrai...
Unlike others, like LG or Samsung, that put out a couple of press releases claiming they exited but in reality still do business including marketing or operating factories in russia. Or Apple that just switched all their business through neighboring countries and still continue to remove any app russian government demands and pays all the fines they get
It's better to be the king of a niche.
Ironically, back then they praised JetBrains for not following hype staying focused on IDE and Dev environment
I have used their support before, to be extremely impressed. This is an area that they could differentiate themselves in.
> Figures are the company's own (unconsolidated) statutory statements filed with the Czech business register…
Are these as reliable as the U.S. 10K or its European equivalent?
I assume that a company like JetBrains would be investing in shifting products around A.I., so it doesn’t seem too surprising that they don’t report a profit for 2025.
then Sbirka listin and download the filings. It's all in Czech so put it through GPT for translation
Summary:
JetBrains s.r.o. went negative because a large foreign-exchange loss overwhelmed a much smaller operating profit. The report explicitly identifies CZK 1.516 billion of currency losses caused by the Czech koruna strengthening against major foreign currencies. But “it was just accounting” would be incomplete: operating profit also fell 63.2%. These accounts use Czech accounting rules, not IFRS.
So two separate things happened: operations deteriorated by CZK 1.291 billion, and the financial result deteriorated by CZK 2.016 billion. Lower taxes cushioned the fall rather than causing it. Approximately 61% of the deterioration before tax came from the financial section and 39% from operations.
For cash generation, the reported operating cash flow is positive—but requires caution. It increased from CZK 5.059 billion to CZK 6.353 billion. However, the 2025 statement includes CZK 6.672 billion of positive net working-capital adjustments, while its before-working-capital subtotal is negative CZK 60.926 million. The positive final figure therefore should not be read as CZK 6.353 billion of recurring cash earnings.
Removing only that disclosed currency loss would produce CZK 1,191.121 million of profit before tax. That is a mechanical sensitivity calculation—not an IFRS profit figure or a fully currency-neutral result. It leaves derivative gains and all other reported amounts unchanged, and it should not be treated as adjusted after-tax profit. The report says the 2025 “other financial income” line consists mainly of derivative income.
Which is a shame really - this is similar to old blacksmithing tools.
There are companies where you'd rather be the owner, and others where you'd rather be an employee, or a customer. I think the JetBrain's customers are the real winners in this one.
It's 16,000 * 1 million CZK, so ~730m USD, no?
"Hey! Look! We grew to power by making perfect, powerful development IDE! Let's get a bunch DeZiGnErS on board to dumb it down and piss off everyone"
Yes, I HATE their new UIs (we are on the second take where we had NewUI and now it's Islands)... ClassicUI has almost 1m downloads because it makes the UI _sane_ and while I renewed my subscription for AllPack this year I've done it griting my teath... will see next year if I'll stick…
First, revenue is growing, assets - too. I believe company does some money burning to compete. According to the prev years nett income, they should have collected a reasonable amount of money so a little money burn doesn't harm.
Second, the Gross Profit is only 72.1m whereas the Revenue is 675m. That means, 600m is somewhere in the COGS. Not sure how to read this.
Where are these financials coming from?
I’m not surprised.
I doubt I will remain a subscriber for the entirety of next year.
Let's look at their AI product, it suuuuucks. They released it, and it literally did not function. I purchased it, and it kept giving me licensing errors. Contacted support and they couldn't tell me anything. Okay, cool, cancel it and refund me. This is useless.
That was a while ago. Today, it still sucks. AI Chat is a bolted-on afterthought that looks like a hackathon project and functions like one. Isn't deeply embedded in the editors. Clunky. Slow. Ugly to look at. Doesn't integrate nicely with all the tools. No native AI plugins, you're forced into their garbage.
What are they DOING?!?
They really didn't do well with AI integration the past few years. When Cursor was all the rage, JetBrains was pushing their own service whose pricing wasn't transparent and just didn't hold up to SotA. I'd still agree that using Codex or Claude from CLI is a better user experience.
Yet, looks like their revenue is up. Wonder where they're investing.
I'm paying hundreds of dollars to use the IDE. The least they could do is integrate well with other harnesses (like every other text editor in the world does).
It was the first time I'd used an IDE, the first time I'd built a cross platform app, first time I'd used Kotlin, and the first time I'd tried AI coding.
The journey started with choosing KMP as the stack, then I figured "here's the company that released KMP, they have an IDE, they have AI, I'll use that".
It was really useful, and convinced me that AI coding was the future. I didn't know Kotlin (I still don't) and I don't look at any of the code. I do look at diffs sometimes (less and less). My main "review" is "reviewing test failures", which is a workflow I developed over the past year.
It was about 4 months into using it that I figured out that the IDE was really doing nothing.
I rewrote their worktree functionality as a couple of bash scripts. The build and test functionality was all gradle on the command line anyway. I was just using it as a chat interface and a markdown reader.
So I set up tmux and used Junie CLI (I liked Junie as an agent), Kimi Code and Pi Coding agent simultaneously on different projects. Junie CLI was pretty good, but it had too many instructions and when I started getting particular about my workflows, compliance was too difficult.
Kimi Code and Pi kept winning, eventually I stopped using Junie altogether. The name of the game was doing things in parallel and in the background. Editing the code had nothing to do with it.
The thing I missed was how JetBrains AI credits worked. I loved switching between models, and didn't want to tell everyone on the team to have their own accounts. I looked around and saw some LLM gateways and stuff like OpenRouter, but then they are all still charging extra, so I just wrote my own LLM gateway and connected it to Pi.
But then I was like "what is Pi really doing here?". I wanted a thing I could use from my phone, and using tmux over Termius is pretty weak, so I was like "Oh maybe I can have a mobile app that uses Pi as an API or something" but then I kept hearing the creator of Pi talk about how simple the coding loop was so I just wrote the coding loop into my LLM gateway and then created clients for it for iOS, android, macOS, windows and web, all using Kotlin Multiplatform.
Now I've got my dream coding agent: I create work trees at the touch of a button from my phone, I discuss with the agent using the "reply mode" interleaved reply feature, I have a flexible bash script based workflow engine, a centralised script/skill distribution framework, centralised billing/model gateway, all built into a single dev box that runs everything and can be deployed using one of those fancy curl -> bash pipeline things. I can deploy to dev, staging and production at the touch of a button from my phone. Dev and staging are IP gated behind CloudFlare tunnels, the production deployment goes straight to GCP, using a standardised framework.
My colleagues and I use it to ship real internal and external products and they're not even developers.
I haven't read any code or reviewed any "PRs". I don't even use GitHub or linear!! But man when I go for a walk and sit down on park benches and dictate to my coding agent in my phone, set the workflow running and then keep walking it feels like a super power!
And this was more or less 1 year from starting my first project using IntelliJ IDEA + Junie + OpenAI GPT 5 and winding up using a mix of models on my own platform that I share with my colleagues.
I don't understand how an IDE development company or, really, any "coding agent development" company can maintain a competitive edge in the face of that kind of pressure.
EDIT: I did find their Air product very intriguing but they didn't get it released quickly enough and it didn't solve the problem of having things running in the background easily enough. Also their worktree setup and teardown functionality was a bit of a drag. I built my own platform and started using it to build itself quicker than they got Air to the stage where I would want to use it. They STILL haven't released their mobile client.
This is why we see so many Electron apps these days (though Jetbrains was shipping IDE's before electron existed).
Their main moat was smart refactor, and a few other nice tools to debug. regardless of what you think about coding is done, agents and your harness is the best tool. I heard they doing business accelerator to find a new business ideas. But as a company, hardly imagine anyone buying expensive IDE in 2 years. Why?
I guess you're all in on that Anthropic IPO with the "coding is solved" approach.
If the first part follows the second, the surprise is that revenue is up while the prevailing opinion appears to be "no-one needs to buy an IDE".
edit: added the extra words + I must mention I'm talking about legacy maintenance projects
The landscape is changing significantly, and I think these types of tools will become more popular.