This is sad. It seems innovation has all but stopped for IDEs intended for a human as the primary driver.
Hi!
Let the people that want to build an IDE from the ground up have their fun over in VSCode land, please just focus on a powerful IDE that works out of the box.
PS: Agentic development is fine to pursue but so far things like Claude Code run laps around everything JetBrains has tried. Add "mount points" for agentic flows but please just focus on making a powerful IDE. Agentic development was unable to lure me away from JetBrains, double down on that, not trying to be Cursor.
Too bad everyone wants a different one of these.
That's vscode's moat.
Anytime the same extension exist in both vscode and jetbrains, the jetbrains version is clunky, crash, and unstable.
I keep Jetbrains open while using vscode, for its local history/git/etc features, but how long will that be enough to keep my subscription
Moving to Apple Silicon made it bearable for a few months but somehow Jetbrains manages to get slow even on a M3 Max with 36GB RAM.
Ive been fiddling with configs for years, i tried everything since i was a Jetbrains diehard.
Instead of trying to catch up to other AI editor they should get back to their core and make it possible to use Jetbrains on medium sized Monorepos with multiple languages.
I was hyped when i heard they would release a standalone git product, but then they scrapped it!
In the end i was only dependent on it for debugging and my usual git workflow.
I now switched to zed and gitkraken, i will figure out a new debugging workflow, ill never wait 5 minutes for a simple search action again
I thought with Kotlin they'd invest a ton of energy into Kotlin Native in order to produce fully native IDEs that can squeeze out drastically more performance, but its been over a decade of nothing happening with Kotlin that's worthwhile (despite it having had so much potential, and being a literal key language for Android ???) so I'm really kind of over JetBrains, the only thing I'll miss is DataGrip since Zed is a code editor not a DB editor. Fleet was a good idea, but poorly done, the UI was weird as hell, and it did not feel like it was as snappy as something like Zed or Sublime.
As proven by their own survey, Kotlin is not taking over the JVM world as many assert,
https://devecosystem-2025.jetbrains.com/tools-and-trends
Java 33%, Kotlin 8% as the primary programming language among all existing ones, surveys that focus only on the JVM ecosystem show even smaller percentage for Kotlin.
I’ve been paying for a personal license for about 20 years and I’ve been thinking of dropping it. I don’t use it much, but I wanted access to something that I could use offline. I’m not sure that’s possible at this point, so the main appeal is kind of gone for me.
I frequently choose “lesser” tools if it means I’m guaranteed they’ll run offline. I’ve always wanted to have a dev container with all the tools needed to develop 100% offline if needed. Licensing makes that almost impossible and Jetbrains doesn’t look like they have any solutions that work great for 100% offline development anymore.
I might check out Zed this week. I’ve never heard of it. If anyone has some great resources for 100% offline development, I’d love to see them. My subscriptions are getting out of hand and this may be the year for me to trim the fat.
Other than the case you mention (paid service asking for license check) I can’t think of any limitation. Vs code, neovim, zed, eMacs, they should all work. Obviously if you need to clone a repo or download dependencies you need a connection but other than that…
The pivot to AI is concerning but the technology is solid and most importantly, it is open source.
I'm kind of mad that JetBrains wouldn't open source Fleet even after EOL, and going as far as taking down the download (something annoying for people that care about software preservation - I hope archive.org has a copy). I can't support a company like this
(I do use Zed with agents, because it's really good/helpful.)
There was always a regression like this in every new build, along with the performance issues. Also switched to Zed + Claude Code/Codex.
I will miss the debugger (a little bit).
However, it's been crazy fast since always. Lately the lisp engine also got compilation to native code, so it's even faster. I occasionally get a slow down when I open a new project and emacs has to wait for the language server to boot.
> I was hyped when i heard they would release a standalone git product, but then they scrapped it!
Magit is cool :P
Also, emacs is free and runs pretty much everywhere. Truly worth learning.
Whatever starter kit you choose, I recommend giving one a go. The experience is really good these days.
As a sysadmin that has to often jump from machine to machine it’s nice to be able to install whatever emacs release the os vendor ships and be productive
The last 3-4 releases have really enriched vanilla Emacs (LSP support, tree sitter support, project.el). Emacs adds default packages somewhat conservatively but it seems like everything that gets included by default ends up with very solid integration/support with other packages
> As a sysadmin that has to often jump from machine to machine it’s nice to be able to install whatever emacs release the os vendor ships and be productive
Quite true, although TRAMP gives Emacs users another good alternative to "bringing the config along"!
> As a sysadmin
I think it's also fair for operators to install the tools they use/like the most on the systems they administer. If a more recent Emacs release makes you happier, why not use Guix to include a portable copy of the latest release on all your servers?
The issue is related to using a monorepo with lots of code in different languages - openening single folders is fine. Ut i want to be able to work on dozens of services in a single window, all other editors manage just fine
Really? That surprises me, given that I don't have any performance issues at all on my first gen dell xps 13.
Which specific products do you use? I use mostly intellij ultimate, but I have been playing around a bit with the community edition of Rover lately too. They're both silky smooth on my nearly 13 years old ultra portable.
If its Webstorm maybe its because of automatic refresh capability ? I've had perf issues with VSCode as well with autobuild enabled. Autocomplete would grind to a halt.
Also the CEO bragging about the incredible adoption numbers for their "opt-in only" and "not default" UI redesign. Which is a bald-faced lie. It was opt-in for a year or two, and was the opt-out default for years after that. Now there's no option.
but sigh. Jetbrains really just has no focus.
Fleet came at a time when intellij felt extremely bloated. iirc they had painted themselves into a corner where it was easier to rip the band aid and start anew.
Fleet was supposed to be that promised editor which was snappy and had the power of intellisense + all things we liked about Intellij editors ... but without the terrible glacial bloat. but in a stroke of bad luck and typical lack of focus from Jetbrains, Fleet just didn't get good enough quickly.
I say lack of focus because (like their multiple attempts at AI) Jetbrains also had a lite mode in the start but that didn't work great. then came Fleet. But it was not getting better quickly enough and they changed course to make Fleet their main cross platform editor ... but even that didn't take.
I really am worried for Jetbrains and intellij. In a world where even VScode is having its lunch eaten by Cursor, Jetbrains is quickly getting pushed out of the list of contenders. they've squandered away a lead they once had in a certain niche for code editors.
I personally only pull up Intellij these days when there's some platform specific tool that's built in (like the emulator in Android Studio) or certain Android specific profiling tools, or the debugger.
Otherwise I rarely find myself using Intellij. My usage has dropped precipitously.
Their matrix of features/capabilities across IDEs, platforms, plugins, etc is such a pitfall-happy maze to navigate.
My problem was that Fleet just wasn't very good when compared with VSC.
For my more serious development I use JetBrains IDEs (one of the few pieces of software that I actually pay for, alongside MobaXTerm and some others) but Fleet didn't neither use that much less resources, nor was that much more responsive, nor was a step above VSC in any way. To be clear, I didn't hate it, it wasn't horrible and with a bit more work could have been quite good... just not convincingly so up until now.
If they wanted to throw some more years of engineering at it, maybe, I mean look at what Zed is doing and it seems to be okay, but I don't think it makes that much business sense for them - they already have Junie available in their editors for AI stuff and that other subscription (though I just use Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and sometimes VSC with KiloCode/RooCode/Cline and either those models through the API or Cerebras Code since it works pretty well in there).
I just find that most AI solutions out there are also a little bit half-baked, like Gemini CLI fails when I paste multiple lines into it, whereas KiloCode/RooCode/Cline are unable to give a model enough helpful instructions for it to not start looping when it fails applying a complex diff sometimes, and pretty much nothing outside of the regular GitHub Copilot plugins does autocomplete decently (especially if you want a local model with Ollama or something, no good options, Continue.dev is trash).
With how prevalent AI is and how useful various linters and build output is, sometimes I wonder whether I need to pay hundreds of euros for the Ultimate package of tools when I don't write/refactor as much code manually and doing what I need inside of VSC also feels more and more sufficient. Maybe a bit except Java codebases, Spring Boot sometimes does weird shit and you're better served by an IDE that's aware of all of the templating, annotations and other stuff.
Oh well, despite being RAM hogs, I still enjoy the experience of using JetBrains IDEs and if nothing else will keep them around for that reason for a while. A bit like how I also enjoy a GUI of some sort for Git, like previously I paid for GitKraken but reevaluating my usage found that SourceTree is also decent enough for the price (free vs GitKraken paid version), I can just drop down to the CLI for niche use cases.
It would stand out if you focused on performance and not rebuilding another sluggish Java based editor. Zed is what I'll be ditching my JetBrains sub for, and it is not just some VS Code based editor. What happened to JetBrains? They used to be amazing, now its just disappointment all around? Did they elect a terrible CEO?
Netscape tried to remake Navigator whilst halting development on the old codebase, and it killed them.
Microsoft tried to remake Word, the rewrite failed. Luckily they had continued to develop the old codebase in parallel.
Google tried to remake Gmail multiple times. Every attempt failed.
Apple tried for years to remake MacOS Classic and failed every time. Eventually they had to buy and reskin NeXTStep.
Banks are full of war stories trying to migrate off their old mainframe codebases, and often giving up.
I kinda expected Fleet to die from the day it was first announced. IntelliJ is an extremely mature product that's hard to compete with. They've continually managed big changes to it to keep up with changing fashions and trends in the IDE space, most recently with their new Islands theme that launched yesterday, with integrated coding agents and so on. It's outlasted continuous competition from free IDEs that are always abandoned after enough years pass and whichever executive was championing subsidies moves on or retires (see: NetBeans, Eclipse, VS Express, MonoDevelop...). VS Code isn't so different. Fleet was clearly a reaction to that but the concept was not innovative and focused on reinventing wheels that users wouldn't be able to tell the difference for and which would consume most of their budget, like writing a new UI toolkit, or using a split frontend/backend architecture. Same mistake Mozilla made. Meanwhile IntelliJ was continuously refactored and improved, so Fleet chased a moving target even when they reused a lot of code.
Although people will hate to hear it, the history of the IDE market suggests that eventually MS will get tired of funding VS Code without a big revenue stream to justify its existence. Executives like making new projects and being able to present growth because it represents glittering future potential, but they hate being landed with the maintenance of loss making legacy projects when the originators move on. There's no glory there. For all their problems, JetBrains aren't going to lose interest in their core products due to random executive churn, and that has given their core IDEs a remarkable staying power.
Most of the time it's a question of trying to apply "death by a thousand cuts" to their codebase, which works well enough as long as you're in the periphery, but eventually they start moving into "core business", you know that entangled mess that has 60 years old code that still runs today, and they realize they need to rewrite all of it, which will take a long time, and cost a lot of money, and they forget about it again for a few years.
It's the same problem everywhere with large and old codebases. You can easily amputate a tentacle here and there, but as soon as you get to the core of it, it is basically one giant monolith, and with age there has been added loads of "integrations" or "shortcuts" between various subsystems, and nobody in the company today has any idea why it is like it is, it just is and it works.
A bank I used to work for had somewhere around 50000 batch programs running nightly. Some were the same program running multiple times, but at least 20000 were "unique" programs. All of those programs had to fit like pearls on a string, each working off of the output of the previous program in the chain.
Untangling that mess is like peeling an onion one layer at a time, with the added bonus that the output of one program might be the final result for some report, and at the same time the input for some other program that needs to do something else.
Add to that, that there's no inherent problem with the mainframe or COBOL. They both work, and reliably as well. Both can push some serious IO through the system, loads that many x86/x64 builds would struggle with.
The conventional answer to IO problems is eventual consistency, which doesn't really work well with finance, at least not if applied broadly. You can get some of the way with slicing / partitioning, but you will still have to deal with a lot of traffic between partitions.
Also Netbeans is my favourite Java editor for hobby coding at home.
The history of IDE market is also about the IDEs that come from OS vendors, and are a much have to target their platforms, at least for those that don't enjoy to yak shaving their favourite tools into the official development workflows from said platforms.
There JetBrains already has scored big time, getting into bed with Google for Android Studio and Kotlin, so much that it wouldn't surprise me if some day Google acquires JetBrains.
I didn’t really want to switch to VSC but the extensions made it easy to find things that you just couldn’t do in IntelliJ, and… I haven’t looked back. Haven’t really missed the suite at all.
As for general development JetBrains just works. VSCode requires a bunch of extensions made by different independent authors with different standards and it just feels glued together and inconsistent
InteliJ only recently acquired the capability to use Clion plugins for JNI development, something that Eclipse and Netbeans have been capable of for the last 20 years, more or less.
They still don't have an incremental Java compiler, yeah you can use the one from Eclipse, so there is yet another thing that it doesn't do better.
Finally, what is with all that indexing after all these years?
Personally I thought I would never switch from Pycharm/Webstorm after 12 years of using. 1 day and no way to go back. Insane.
I saw they implemented custom AI model and it was useless compared to frontier models. The moment is lost. I hope they will catch up and show who is the king.
I found out about it because switching accounts isn't possible, you get logged into your old account unless some time has elapses.
Not a big security issue though, I mean after a day or so it it's actually logged out, just not within the same hour (no idea how long it actually takes - just know it's not within an hour)
Or LLM's aren't really that great after all? Then focus on your damn IDE. Leave refactoring by hallucination to the electron kids and just provide stable and performant editors and analyses around Abstract Syntax Trees.
Currently LLMs are a rather bad productivity booster for programming, but in the near future, this will change. Whatever IDE has exceptional support for the workflows that will be possible by AI will have an insanely attractive value proposition in the future.
been hearing this for three years now
JetBrains, just focus on improving the existing IDEs and naturally embedding access to third party LLM agents in them and you're good to go.
In recent times it seems like IntelliJ has become what I ran away from Eclipse for, i.e. bloat and non-performance.
It used to be that no matter what language you were working with, JetBrains was the answer for the serious poweruser.
Now JetBrains is little more than VSCode with a subscription. They've absolutely ruined the UI, performance keeps getting worse, they're trying really hard to shove their useless AI at you, and when you complain about it, you either get dismissed, deleted, or gaslighted.
JetBrains is actively pushing out their base power users and betting the entire farm on taking a small percentage of VSCode users.
All the old hats like me are canceling subscriptions while new users are piling onto the free versions and are unlikely to convert to paid.
Because again, JetBrains has stripped their programs of any utility or identity and just made a cheap VSCode clone that costs a ridiculous amount of money for no apparent benefit.
I'm really mad about this. JetBrains made IDEs that sparked joy. It was a real tool for real professionals that need to get shit done and not play 40 goddamn questions to find the unlabeled button I'm looking for. They used to get out of your way and stay there. Now I have disembodied text floating in an undifferentiated sea of whitespace and hieroglyphs.
And through all of this, JetBrains insists that I'm wrong for wanting labeled buttons or for not wanting a new UI. A JetBrains employee told me to my face that the new UI had to happen because they must innovate. They did not offer a response when asked about what they've innovated instead of copying from VSCode.
JetBrains put essentially all core development on halt for years and spent millions of dollars on the UI redesign. They brag about how many thousands of bugs they fixed in the new UI, and seem to be unaware that they're bragging that they created several thousand new bugs instead of fixing old ones.
JetBrains has totally lost the plot and are on the fast track to irrelevance.
guitcastro•1mo ago
cpburns2009•1mo ago
pixl97•1mo ago
In the business cycle this is particularly risky.
You'll have a smaller base of users that don't want AI slop, but will keep using your AI anyway even if it's there.
But what you lose is the large paying corporate customers that demand 'soup de jour' that end up going to VScode or whatever, and you may never get them back.
Building software is hard, being profitable at it is even harder.
cpburns2009•1mo ago
dijit•1mo ago
misswaterfairy•1mo ago
Please, for the love of all things almighty, re-invest in your core IDEs. That's what you're known for, and that's what professional developers want.
I don't want a glorified text editor that does a few cheap tricks, and is 'AI first'. I know I'm going to piss off a few people here rubbishing VS Code, however people are blown away when I show them how much more powerful PyCharm is when debugging complex code.
Its embarrassing that there are many popular, numerously starred, issues across JetBrains' YouTrack that have been open for nearly a decade, that are already well integrated features in other, free, IDEs.
However all is not lost - you have a great suite of products that need much more tender love and care. They'll see you through.
You already have AI in the AI Assistant plugin. Make your core fleet of IDEs worth the investment, for new and existing JetBrains customers alike. AI, agentic or not, will only get programmers so far before it's time to toss the kids toys then break out the real tools that require human intuition, domain knowledge, and reasoning.
To pick up on one of the points in the article:
> Combining them in a single tool results in a disjointed experience, so the Fleet team chose to stop competing with IDEs and code editors and instead build a product focused on agentic workflows. This led to a pivot to a new product: an agentic development environment.
You don't need to develop an entire IDE/environment for this. Develop plugins/enhance the existing AI Assistant plugin for these workflows that integrate with your existing IDEs, 'the real tools' I was talking about above.
I feel like this new "agentic development environment" is making the Fleet mistake all over again, when you could be value-adding to your already great suite of IDEs directly by way of plugins, and also continue to refactor and improve your IDEs along the way.
_boffin_•1mo ago
closeparen•1mo ago
The development experience in IntelliJ-family IDEs is incomparably superior, but you have got to figure out how to run the code indexing on the remote server and the UI locally. This quasi VNC thing isn't it.
7e•1mo ago