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Comment by efficax | Hacker News Reader

Engineers abandoning IDEs or did they burn a ton of cash on AI?

I have paid out of pocket for Jetbrains for 15 years. I don’t think I’ve opened it in the past year and should probably cancel my subscription.

For me, the things that made Jebteains great just don’t matter anymore.

What do you use then?

I still use it a lot for reviewing the code.

It is a good code viewer but way too heavy if you want to switch between branches often on a sufficiently large product.

You'll be surprised (or not) to find out a lot of people aren't using anything. Claude gets asked to build it, then some other clown uses their copy of Claude to do the PR review and then it gets merged.

VSCode for the rare time I need to view a file.

GitHub or Tuicr for code review. Still waiting for an agentic first review environment- which Jetbrains has missed the ball on.

given that their revenue is still increasing, I'm guessing it's the latter

Their revenue is increasing, but their profits have been on a decline despite increased revenue. The table on that page only goes back to 2021, but the trend of increasing revenue and decreasing profits has been going on at least that long. I don’t think ai would have been a factor that far back. Even though github copilot did launch sometime around then, I doubt it was much of a factor.

What stands out to me is https://www.helgilibrary.com/companies/jetbrains/total-cash-...

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.

I find IntelliJ IDEA a great tool, even for my fully vibecoded apps. I edit the READMEs in it, look at the version history, use it for debugging, for builds, and so on.

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.

Like or not, LLM are getting better at debugging than humans... Not sure for how long will companies will keep paying for IDEs (which, tbf, are peanuts compared to the LLM cost).

Why not both?

If engineers are abandoning IDEs then shouldn't they be following the engineers?

Both

The truth is there is no money to be made from (good) offline software.

I canceled my DotNet Ultimate subscription (or whatever it's called) earlier this year, even though Rider is (was) one of the best IDEs for my main squeeze, F#. It's not because I don't use Rider or IDEs, but because I've felt the quality has gone downhill ever since I first started paying for it. What broke the camel's back was the constant surveys they were sending me surveys asking how much I love AI in Rider, and how much I wanted to see more AI in their IDEs, when all I wanted was an IDE that didn't have some shitty new F# language bug every time I updated it.

Ironically, I finally got around to using AI to configure my Neovim setup with a decent F# and C# experience. I don't have it set up with a debugger yet, but at least I'm not paying hundreds of dollars every year for a company to neglect the thing I paid for.

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