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Comment by ipsod | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone had a good experience with Junie, to share?

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.

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I tried it in DataGrip on a messy database. It hallucinated about which tables and columns to use. Had better results using Claude in the terminal and having it give me the SQL to run.

I use it daily, but I'm also the AI consumer that is looking for something like a hammer and a saw (it's clear what their job are and they're doing their job fine). I'm absolutelty not looking for the next-gen-stuff, so I avoid Codex/Claude/...

Junie is boring, and that's perfect (for me).

I think Junie is comparable to something like Claude Code or Codex, but moving a little slower feature wise. It's perfectly adequate for developers who want to use AI but don't want to keep up with the bleeding edge of tooling.

It felt quite competitive about a year ago. But haven't tried it since, no idea how it has held up with the other advancing. What I liked was the tight integration with the IDE. I don't particularly like the way I work with Claude now, still wanting to check the changes, navigate code, ask questions, write some code myself etc. Feel claude mostly is for the "bigger" changes. Sometimes I just want to select some text and refactor it, or ask a stupid simple question without the "chat".

Worked fine as a free tool, but as long as AI companies are selling their slopware tokens below cost with subscriptions, it's not really that interesting in my opinion.

The Jetbrains integration is nice, but if you rely on the tool you're probably not going to use the IDE much anyway.

Not personally but Junie was what made the fellow developer I respect most in the world actually start taking notice of LLMs as something useful instead of bad.

I used it for a bit.

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 enjoyed it a lot early on. In particular it didn’t have all the confusing and anxiety inducing options that other agents have to use more expensive or less expensive models, I liked the way it approached “plan mode” [1] and I didn’t feel like I had to stress it about token costs the way I do with the other models…. Jetbrains now gives me a choice of agents which I don’t like because having to think about it makes feel like one of those “ai bros” who is overthinking their relationship to ai and underthinking their code.

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?”

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