Just yesterday tried Intellij ai assistant setup and it sucks. I mainly use Cursor but also have Codex sub, and since version 3.15 Cursor made changes that nerfed Codex experience inside IDE, so I reluctantly look for replacement that could allow me to use both from a single interface. Intellij kinda allows for that unified interface, but is very prototype-y quality, missing features from both Cursor and Codex, can not import historical conversations and their auth UX is meh. Not sure if they will be able to catch up to competition from there.
hey darkwi11ow, would love to hear more about the fricition you experienced in the setup! don't want people immediately moving on when they haven't even had the opportunity to experience the tool!
Hey few things that are deal breakers for me (I tried Intellij IDEA community edition, AI assistant)
1) Import of historical data from agents. I often look up past agent sessions and require search into them as a primary feature of the harness. I know for a fact that historical conversations are not encrypted for both Codex and Cursor on a local filesystem, so Intellij tool could import them into ai assistance plugin even before user is authenticated with either Cursor or Codex. There are few annoying things in search for both Cursor and Codex extensions, so having great search over past conversations could be a great introductory feature
2) Auth .. I am not sure about this one technically because I haven't looked myself into how agent auth is done for Cursor and Codex, but at least for Codex, their IDE extension for vscodium/cursor/zed/etc. is able to use existing authentication from the CLI codex tool, so I do not need to login into every new IDE I try Codex extension in. With Intellij Codex auth did not work at all for me.
3) Cursor authentication worked, though I needed second one for Intellij while being logged in with CLI, but the model reasoning level is not selectable from within ai assistant, one more deal breaker for me unfortunately (I found it stays like this for a long time: https://forum.cursor.com/t/intellij-cursor-acp-reasoning-lev...)
