I’ll try this out but after over a decade as a paid JetBrains customer I’ve been looking at the door. I still love their IDE and moving around the code in it but the IDE uses way too many resources. Even with me excluding the worktrees folder it gets stuck indexing/processing when I spin up new worktrees to the point that I’ve found myself killing IDEA regularly to regain system resources. 99% of my work happens in the terminal now and JetBrains has been very slow to adapt. If I get one more “can’t checkout branch, it’s checked out in a worktree” error I’m going to lose my mind, give me an auto-heal option or something. This is how work is done, don’t make me leave your IDE to fix it myself on the cli.
I’ll try out Air but I don’t have high hopes, my current workflows work great and I’m still not sold on what Air offers even after reading this post and the page about Air.
Nevermind, Air is DOA: "Authentication with Claude Pro/Max/Team plans is not permitted by Anthropic’s Terms of Service" - Sorry, but unless you can use a subscription then I can't afford to use your tool. I understand the ToS, I wish it was more open, but the reality is that API pricing is way too high and a subscription is all that makes sense currently.
I tend to feel fine with IDEs using buckets of resources, after all: they are specialist tools.
But I have been using their jetbrains remote system, and you can clearly see how incredibly high the RAM usage is on both server and client.
Personally I am also looking at the door, but not because of the resource usage… but because they keep putting resources into things which aren’t their core offering and it makes me wonder if they have run out of innovation in that area.
… then again, they did recently figure out how to make development on a Windows remote work… so I can keep using my linux machine while developing Windows software, so I think that earned a lot of goodwill from me.
I find I still use the paid IDE's (RustRover and WebStorm), even when using LLM's for reviewing code and applying corrections. It's often just faster to do that, especially with an IDE which allows for quick non linear navigation through the files (following functions etc.). I think this is where JetBrain's IDE's excel. I can live with the high startup cost as long as it is quick afterwards.
I do feel however they have been neglecting anything non-AI for a while now. I in particular loved their auto complete, and with the new guesswork AI auto complete it's just not the same. I want deterministic behaviour from my IDE.
On the LLM side, I couldn't use the Anthropic subscription with their offerings, so I just use it from a harness outside the IDE, and switch to the IDE for review. This may not be JB's fault, but it still makes their offering useless to me.
I may be one of the few remaining but I also still program myself sometimes (I weigh it based on the task). The IDE has been pushing so much AI it has been getting in my way sometimes, and it is definitely using more resources for stuff I don't use.
I too am on the fence on whether I'll resume my subscription. Luckily for JB I dearly dislike VSCode's code navigation and interface, and would severely miss their debugging tools integration.
JetBrainer here. For both this comment and the parent...I get you. It feels like the whole industry has gotten sucked into this vortex where people don't even look at code anymore.
I'm happy about our Air launch because we're being AI "realists"...neither too much sunshine pumping nor too much skeptic. We're doubling down on developers and development, both when you type and when you don't.
On to the point..I can promise the PyCharm is doing some pretty massive non-AI stuff on the deterministic side. I think determinism is the best path to trusting the code generated by the box.
JetBrainer here. About worktrees, I've seen the internal demos and we are making progress on that. It's actually an interesting problem, conceptually, about the index.
About the terminal, honest question...is that because you are looking at code less and less? Writing code less and less?
Yes, it’s because I’m writing less code by hand. I mostly use IDEA now to navigate/review the code or do my own debugging/tracing. My time in the IDE has fallen drastically which is why the high ram/cpu usage when I’m not even “using” the ide are so frustrating, especially since I’ve excluded the nested worktrees parent folder (.claude/worktrees). I can handle IDEA being dumb when it comes to worktrees, I can’t handle it locking up after I’ve told it to ignore them.
I know harnesses (and harness harnesses) have a long way to go and lots of improvements even without models getting “smarter”, I’m rooting for JetBrains but so far IDEA has been more of hindrance in the LLM-era. The CLI TUI’s have become the most important tool I have and the GUI versions haven’t kept pace.
I’d love to live in IDEA instead of the CLI but so far I’ve found that to be too limiting and not as adaptable to our rapidly changing field. Maybe Air will help with that, we will see.
I want something like herdr in IDEA, a way to monitor agents, smart worktree integration, easily visualize changes and use the power of the InteliJ brains to assist in coding (lint/checks/etc).
Right now my IDE gets more in my way than assists me in shipping code.
IntelliJ was the perfect IDE ... two years ago maybe? Very little that has been added since improved my experience, a bunch of it gets in my way, and I'm sick of being prompted to try the latest and greatest AI integrations.
I don't think that there's a better alternative at the moment, and I get the need to pump out features to keep the revenue stream going, but I miss the slimmer versions
I’ll try out Air but I don’t have high hopes, my current workflows work great and I’m still not sold on what Air offers even after reading this post and the page about Air.