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Comment by patwolf | Hacker News Reader

I used to use Claude inside of a terminal within Webstorm until I realized I rarely looked at the code in the IDE. Instead I was creating draft PRs and reviewing the code in github. Now I use claude inside of herdr, and I appreciate having more screen real estate devoted to claude. As a long-time Jetbrains subscriber it pains me to stop using it. But at this point, I'm not sure what they could come up with that would be compelling enough for me to switch back.

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Their coding agent "Junie" is actually really good. The problem is they force you through only a few curated models. And try to funnel you through them to subscribe to do it, too. It's not like Pi or opencode that lets you just point at an OpenAI API endpoint and then choose whatever model. If I recall you can even actually use local models, or openrouter etc, but only use the specific model variants from their curated list. It's insane. They tried to stick themselves in the middle, and failed. Nobody will use it.

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.

You can actually configure the ide with any open ai compatible endpoint, I use llma and it lists all the models that I have currently installed, works well. Or am I missing your point?

Junie in particular, or just their various other "AI Assistant" / "Chat" things? They have multiple confusing overlapping products/modes going on. "JetBrains AI" -- which may or may not be same as "Junie"?, "AI Chat", then there's the "Agents" tab which integrates outside coding agents.

I guess they iterated quite a few products to "not get behind" and see what sticks.

Most recently they integrated air, which is basically an "agent management/orchestrator" where you can run any ACP-compatible agent with any model you want and it's just the single place where you manage them, see their progress, steer them, merge their results etc.

AI Assistant > Providers & API Key There is an option Third Party AI Provider, where you can select OpenAI compatible, and then you can customize where (core, instant helper, inline etc) do you want to use third party, where JetBrains.

JetBrains face a unique problem: they are a real business that can't just raise infinity money from SoftBank or request government bailouts because the sheer size of their debts imperils the financial system. So they have to do things that might seem annoying or overly pushy versus their competitors.

For their entire existence people have complained about JetBrains this way because they always face some competitor that isn't making money and isn't even trying. Eventually those competitors go down, but a new one instantly arises. People just really love losing money on developer tools.

Wanting to charge money for an AI service is a clearly sensible business move. If their competitors weren't shredding the world's entire supply of investable capital as quickly as possible, this would be a good strategy. Alas.

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