All the death knell comments - Is no one looking at the revenue line? Revenue still trending the same. Costs presumably haven't skyrocketed. They've invested in something big. Thats probably a good thing, and often needed to evolve.
Yeah look at the details below. Revenue is up 6% (which is not amazing but still growth). But staff expenses are up 34.2%. And the real big hint is "Cash Flow From Investing" plunging from -83 million $USD to -469. That's massive. They're staffing up and investing in... something.
I still have this naive notion that we don't need LLMs for code generation and editing. Does a system need the knowledge of the full works of Shakespeare to be able to output Javascript?
Maybe people smarter than me know better but couldn't there be a middle ground where an IDE/Editor has an embedded engine (doesn't need to be a full-on LLM) that doesn't require external tool calls and token spend?
If an organization is paying $2400/year per developer for tokens and a highly intelligent editor/IDE comes around that charges $1000/yr and gets more output at a fixed cost, its a no-brainer of a decision.
> "Does a system need the knowledge of the full works of Shakespeare to be able to output Javascript?"
If the implementation brief says "attempting a reconnect in this handler would be a wild goose chase", the model needs to know enough Shakespeare, at least indirectly, to understand that expression...
You know what, considering there was a recent "small" open weights LLM released recently that meets 90% of my coding needs I'm inclined to agree.
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next - relatively small, it runs on 6 6 year old GPUs on my home PC happily running 5 simultaneous 262k sessions with additional 10 cached in RAM (bought back when you didn't have to remortgage your house for Ram) and it has been the first local model that is not a toy.
But there is a class of problems where I still reach for Anthropic's fable...
However, I have a hunch bordering with certainty Anthropic is achieving such great results by doing a lot of harness tricks.
For example opus 4.8, is not much better on coding than before mentioned Qwen model, but gets amazing results on factual knowledge stuff (the knowing all works of Shakespeare thing). How hard would it be to add a general knowledge RAG to requests that contain relevant questions and beat all benchmarks like that? Not very hard.
So I think there is big innovation to be had in harnesses, routers, inference and so on.
As to money spent on AI per developer my current client (a fortune 200 software company) spends $500 per month. That is $6k a year. A lot more than your examples. And many people run out of their quota pretty quickly.
I was inclined to listen to your take… then you started talking about having 6 graphics cards in your computer and acting like that’s a normal thing that people do…
Forgive my naive understanding of LLMs - but how do you get semantic understanding of a codebase, such that it knows what changes to make/why/where, without a wider understanding of language more broadly?
I'm using the word understanding loosely there, but I couldn't think of another word.
Depends on what exactly you want to change. Lsp can do a lot but only in very simple changes.
Intellij when I used to use it had a lot great features like refactoring, extracting part of code as a function, renaming and creating empty classes/boilerplate but that's it
In current job I can order LLM to take data sink from other endpoint and write new with given URL. It will fetch from endpoint, check what it gives, compare with other and write new sink. Then it needs polishing because it always create something as awful as possible with cloning data all around but the most boring and soul sucking part is done
This is why I am working on https://github.com/spockz/semantic-editor. To bring more powerful editing functionality to agents. In a way that attaches to their chain of thought and deals with their probabilistic framing in json so it all works out cheaper and faster.
It's a totally fair question. I'm personally wondering if there's a half way point. Some kind of structured language that isn't plain English that a "dumb" LLM is able to parse. It could be human written, or it could be written by a "smart" LLM at a greater cost.
We’re conditioned to interact with language models as chatbots and in that sense strong language understanding (implicit - some sort of world knowledge), is probably necessary for that?
But I’m sure we can have a small model that’s really strong at programming concepts, JavaScript syntax, and that’s about it. You’d interact with it differently, at specific seams in your code base - review a PR, merge two functions together, investigate these logs.
Or maybe I’m just not adequately absorbing the bitter lesson. Idk
I think the amount of knowledge to correctly work on code is more than you'd think, because at the end of the day writing code without an understanding of the environment it exists in/for is likely to not fit the problem correctly. Maybe it doesn't need knowledge of _Shakespeare_ per se, but if you were working on a virtual tabletop having knowledge of tabletop games can help with identifying the right implementation to use, knowing what kind of constraints to consider, etc.
I think this already happens through Mixture of Experts which is now build in to ost models.
But finding out what an LLM needs to understand from a business side to write your code good, is an otpimzation which no one cares currently.
I'm pretty sure we either stay on big full frontier models for a long time, just use them for everything or we will start to see more and more people doing finetuning/project specific training like java + german + english + business contxt xy;
My gut says the economics, e.g hardware/data center/resource constraints, are going make the economics of small specialized models more attractive. Without any evidence whatsoever, I also think that the big frontier companies will have to de-emphasize chatbots as huge models in favor of chatbots as huge products with a much much more granular mixture of experts approach, but with much smaller models. I’ve been saying for a while now that AI products have to hit the gas on prioritizing product design to reliably solve real people’s problems in predictable-enough ways, because the current approach is only really appealing to enthusiasts, developers, or optimistic managers, and with the kind of money they’re throwing around, that’s not going to work.
1. Storing Shakespeare's work costs almost no $ in regards to disk space.
2. If the prompt doesn't include "Shakespeare" or relevant terms then no regression is performed for that topic and therefore there is no effective token cost.
Someone may correct me, but I think it's not a big $ win to exclude relevant topics from the models' overall capabilities. Instead you'd tune weights so that #2 better identifies what is or isn't among the relevant terms on which to run regressions.
I think you're probably missing the forest for the trees here... broadly speaking, these multibillion "parameter" (whatever that actually means) models store a lot more than shakespeare, and have storage costs in the 100s of GB/TB (which translates to $$$$$$ in SSD/RAM costs), nevermind the (kilos/mega/giga)watts involved, all the pollution, etc...
Meanwhile, a template (maybe a couple KB) costs less than a couple cents to store and run. Large Languages Models are not really interesting, (smaller) LLMs that only contain "what you need" are.
> Maybe people smarter than me know better but couldn't there be a middle ground where an IDE/Editor has an embedded engine (doesn't need to be a full-on LLM) that doesn't require external tool calls and token spend?
IDEA already have small LLM for one line code completion IIRC.
But the gain people want from LLM is generally "here, add this entire feature" or "here, go thru every dependency's changelog and update code to work with latest version". Those are not small LLM tasks
I have hope we will get there eventually, once all the hype/wealth extraction/boys club giving all their buddies money cycles end, and the specialized tools with real value start to emerge.
These specialized tools already deliver tremendous value. What happens on the backend financially is of no concern to me, as I have no influence over it.
I think they're in the perfect position to take a stab at actually monetizing a "just-works-and-good-enough" local code-assistant that works well enough to save people on burning tokens with the big providers and/or keeping their data offline for regulatory reasons (ie also selling to customers that CANNOT use Claude or OpenAI).
1: Local models are catching up quickly
2: Visual Studio Intellicode (not to be confused with Intellisense) was/is surprisingly good at suggestions (when it first appeared before people went over to CLI's I felt that it was almost magically good for it's time, turned off co-pilot and whatever backend for a reason of compliance for a local workspace and the suggestions are quite good still even if not on the same level as the frontier suggestions).
If it pans out, with their brand people many would probably be happy to fork over for a Jetbrains licence.
To do nothing is to die. I've been a JetBrains subscriber for over a decade. Nobody is going to use their tools in five years. I certainly don't need my subscription anymore.
> on some "also ran" LLM sinkhole.
They can't do Junie. It's a dead end. They can't do the same thing everyone else is doing either, or they're exactly as you put it: an "also ran" in a very crowded field.
The only way for JetBrains to survive is to figure out their Garmin play. They either find some niche within the existing product or - maybe (and very improbably) - they can innovate something wild nobody else has figured out yet that provides a path to new fertile pasture. But that's more the startup path than the thriving incumbent facing innovator's dilemma path.
But no matter what, if they stay the course, they're dead. Just like half the people expecting to still be writing code by hand.
I think they are trying new things even with "nobody writes code anymore" in mind. Their IDEs are now MCP servers for agents to reason about the code. Imagine your agent will stop wasting tokens using grep to find symbol usages if he can just ask IDE where it is used. They are not the best option for vibecoders right now but who knows what will happen in 1 year.
Integration with other developer tools, code reviews etc. are better than ever. Ideavim is probably the best vim plugin and it gets new features every month. They are also investing a lot in the AI.
I would bet they will survive just fine unless we would write software in slack only using emoji :-)
Imagine your agent will stop wasting tokens using grep to find symbol usages if he can just ask IDE where it is used. They are not the best option for vibecoders right now but who knows what will happen in 1 year.
Can't agents just use a language server? There are already a bunch of projects that provide this, e.g.: https://www.agent-lsp.com/
Doesn't seem like a huge differentiator anymore?
I don't really know much about their current users, but from a business perspective, post-tokenmaxxing and them having an IDE, it seems like the most efficient environment for having a human in the loop is something they could tackle?
Well nobody needs to use IDE. There were always people who used vim with tmux as their IDE. The value of IDE is the I as in integrated - I see some value in having easy to manage single dev environment with batteries included. (I'm not an IDE guy though, and I personally closer to vim/vscode + plugins)
There were always people who used vim with tmux as their IDE.
But until language servers, IDEs with built-in code analysis had a huge advantage. This stopped once LSP was designed and some language servers got mature. LSP was developed originally by VS Code and it is easy to see why - it allowed VS Code to compete with IDEs without writing their own code analysis by letting language developers write a standard server. This made VS Code (and others like Zed) so powerful, that they had already replaced IDEs for many users (maybe outside Java). LLMs are just another nail in the coffin.
Not using tooling (or not creating one) for repeating tasks and trying to one shot everything with latest frontier model is a difference between the bill for AI usage being 10 Eur or 10000 Eur
And their MCP servers and tools are great! But I wish they’d remember that some of us also actually code in the IDE, because human usage quality of their IDEs has been getting worse in that time…
> They either find some niche within the existing product
They should stay in where they started, dev experience and IDEs custom for each language. Entering the AI coding was a mistake in my opinion, I’m sure one can argue that AI coding would have better tooling without their IDEs, but AI coders (Cc and codex) don’t use IDEs anymore so it’s a lost battle before the start
I remember around 2019 or so they shipped their first AI feature and there was a huge backlash for it. Did that change their direction in anyway? Obviously 2026 is a way different landscape than back then.
I disagree on to do nothing is also to die, I'd love to continue paying if they prioritized bugfixing, speed, remote/container editing and having an open AI ecosystem, as well as supporting any new language features without degenerating into an "always online" editor like vs.code.
I could not care less about "new paradigm" editors, UI reworks and AI lock-in offerings, the only AI I want is let me bring my own local model, or interface with claude / codex / ...
I have been Jetbrains subscriber for over a decade and stopped using them last year. Visual Studio Code did LLM integration better. And now I am using VS Code less and less with AI-native control plane like Paseo. I can literally develop on my mobile phone.
I love their tools and am keeping my subscription for now, but would have to agree.
VSCode has been eating at their users for years now. Jetbrains tools still were much better in my opinion but they are competing with “free” and “good enough”. With AI getting better, the main advantages of Jetbrains are gone.
I don’t need a massive IDE anymore. I still need an editor, but there’s hundreds of better tools for quick edits than a massive IDE.
It’s a company at the end of the day, but I hope they find a niche or pull a Garmin play like you said, otherwise I don’t see them being relevant.
They picked weird direction. "Here, pay ENTIRE EXTRA SUB to use the LLM we made that is worse than one you're already using".
Yeah, no, vast majority just want to pick a AI vendor and integrate it into their IDEA or CLion or whatever other editor they were already using. Pushing into entirely different subscription was dead on arrival.
They figured that out and started integrating it into main tooling (https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/33314-air), but they definitely wasted a bunch of resources on something nobody really wanted.
This was so annoying as a long time subscriber- we were begging them to get / let us integrate some of the more mainstream models - didn’t help that there early model was terrible
> Nobody is going to use their tools in five years.
What will replace it? The dumpster fire called Eclipse, certainly not. The even larger dumpster fire that is Electron based VS Code, also not. And "vibe coding", "agentic AI" etc. will also be a thing of the past once the VC money spigot selling tokens for far below actual cost dries up.
The JetBrains portfolio is here to stay.
(One might even see a total ban for American products in the EU or a significant push in sovereign technology on the horizon, and JB stands to profit from both options!)
I'm not a fan of VS Code myself, but everyone I know uses it (except for people I myself have influenced into using something else). It truly is a sort of default editor these days.
I guess it depends on your niche; I spend half my time coding Golang and Python, and the other half terraform, ansible, perl and I use other languages now and again for small projects and utilities.
In the devops/sysadmin world my stack would be common, and mostly people pick an editor and stick to it. I've been using Emacs for the past 20+ years at this point, and the last time I used Microsoft's IDE was back in the day when I was writing desktop apps using MFC (which probably dates me pretty well!) with visual studio.
I've seen colleagues use anything from atom, vim, emacs, notepad++, and other generic editors whos name I didn't recognize. There are one or two instances of VS Code I see now and again, but they're the outlier rather than the norm in my professional life.
Cost of services is up. I suspect that's where the token cost comes into play, but they didn't "invest" in tokens. They can't call that an investment anyway. The increase in cost of services relative to revenue impacts net income - we can see that in prior years - but that's not the whole story. Total assets on the balance sheet increased at the same time net income decreased. They spent money on something of value.
Could they label that as investing in such a report? Sounds misleading. Investing to me means paying for something you then own afterwards, paying for AI sounds like a normal expense.
Most of their products have an AI harness embedded and it works well, at least for me. Has tools to let the models access proper debugging too(my experience is Clion) so that my build is available to them even when using remote/docker builds. The integration with codex works well too.
They host a lot of models too, and that is probably where they burned the cash.
No idea why they thought they can compete with frontier AI labs on that, it's entirely waste of money
They also tried to push AI feature set as a separate subscription which is just insane in current tooling market.
All users wanted is good integration of multi-AI providers in their base offering. I think they are slowly shifting to that but that's a lot of money wasted already
> ...the real big hint is "Cash Flow From Investing" plunging from -83 million $USD to -469. That's massive. They're staffing up and investing in... something.
...or they're bailing out of really bad investments before they become even worse ones...
Jetbrains has been pushing Junie real hard, my guess is that they've been giving out too many cheap tokens to try to stay relevant as Claude and friends pull people away from the IDE.
In everyone's day jobs where they used an IDE 5 years ago, or even a year ago, are those jobs abandoning the IDE?
I still use Visual Studio in my day job, where Claude's output while VERY helpful, requires my ownership of everything, meaning I am inspecting every single line it changes. If a change is bigger than I think it should, I kill it before I commit.
I know I don't HAVE to use an IDE for that, but if the change is small enough, I am faster than asking Claude to understand the subtext behind my personal context of the product, and the IDE is supremely helpful for making a quick change across a handful of files.
I'm beginning to abandon the IDE (vscode in my case). I've always been very comfortable with (or at least not scared of) the command line so the Claude app with a terminal pane open is handling much of my IDE use cases. What I really need to do is get better at using find, grep, and other search tools from the terminal and then create a good .vimrc for editing and i'm set. heh what's old is new again!
> I am inspecting every single line it changes.
Honestly, when I'm looking at ClaudeCode's output 75% of time i'm doing it to learn and understand and not just check for correctness. I'm confident enough to admit I don't know everything and I've learned a lot from reading Claude's code.
> meaning I am inspecting every single line it changes.
I think this is changing fast. Pressure is increasing on devs for output, and most devs I know are no longer inspecting lines. I have devs in my business unit who claim to not have looked at code for months, except on certain rare occasions. I am not a developer and this week I've been given access to the repo to build my own apps and extensions. There's a "review" between commit and deploy, but there's no chance the Tech Lead can manually review everything, so that's getting done by AI too.
I know this horrifies a lot of devs, but these tools are shockingly good and we are not seeing an increase in bugs. In fact our automated detections (also AI assisted) are reducing the number of customer reported critical bugs.
I really think the days of inspecting every line are over.
This type of codebases will become a goldmine for cybersec in the near future. Except by then, only few people will be able to detect them or fix them. LLMs will leave the hardest problems and most difficult bugs plus and plethora of devs who either have skill atrophy or haven't learn these things in the first place.
It's an interesting philosophic question. LLMs tend to be overly verbose and defensive in coding. It's not a ton of extra complexity but it makes the code harder to follow for a human. But if a human is not writing the code how much does that matter?
I agree that they have gotten shockingly good. It's been a long time since I've seen them do something that is objectively wrong. Once we get closer to the "too cheap to meter" cost level things will change radically again.
Have you ever tried to use an LLM to add a feature to a really nice, pre 2023 codebase? It’s incredible how much easier it is to do, how much of a difference you instantly feel
IMO what's being called an 'Agent Development Environment' solves this issue for you. I like Orca but there's a few dozen of them.
Basically they give you a way to view the code the llm has generated/changed easily, annotate that code for the llm, and manage multiple agents and at once.
I had personal subscriptions to WebStorm and GoLand and cancelled them not long after getting Windsurf. Just don't need the IDE abilities like I used to... Still use 'go to definition' but that's pretty much it.
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.
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/...
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".
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.
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.
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?”
Apparently, no one commenting knows how to read financial statements. They look at one item and assume the company is going out of business. Meanwhile, their total assets have increased. Cost of services have increased significantly over recent years - mostly commensurate with revenue growth, although the gap has been shrinking. Operating costs have been pretty flat. I don't have time to investigate where they spent the money, but the company is not at risk. They brought in more money than in prior years and spent it on something. That's it.
Or more likely, they're burning cash trying to chase the AI train to no avail while their core product stagnates, which is definitely not a good thing.
The war in Ukraine and subsequent move to Czechia did seem to hurt them pretty badly, but I wouldn't say they are stagnant. I've been a happy customer of PHPStorm for years and it continues to improve.
If your existing, well-established product is at risk due to new, competing products that do things in radically different ways, immediately dropping your product to chase the competition from way behind is usually not the right move. Unless you have a significant moat around your ecosystem, what reason do users have to adopt your inferior copy instead of the thing you copied?
I firmly believe JetBrains would have a better chance of survival if they stopped chasing the AI hype and got back to work on their IDEs, accepting the fact that they'll have less users than before. Right now, they're completely lost.
There won't be anyone left to pay for the core product.
Coding by hand is for dinosaurs.
JetBrains needs to figure out the AI workflow that developers will be using over the next decade. Assuming that's going to be a big enough market, of course. A bigger market might be to build for agents and completely autonomous use cases.
IDEs are for professionals. I understand that LLMs can one shot a weather app, and I get that it's exciting, but this is not the case with complex software.
I agree with you in principle but I am seeing my colleague who supposedly is an experienced engineer just sends out 40-file PRs without going through the code. When someone asked why the code does a certain thing he used LLM to come up with an answer. Apparently he has no idea what the code is doing and I doubt he reviews any of it or cares.
Yes, welcome to the new world. This is how things are now. Every couple months the models and tools get better, while everyone keeps assuring themselves that any day now they’re going to run into the wall. Whether we like it or not, this is how it is. Let go and let Claude.
I don't understand what the value proposition of such an employee is. If all you're doing is acting as a meat proxy between your manager and your AI, why does your role even exist? Why shouldn't your superiors just prompt the AI directly?
I agree. Even in the era of LLMs, part of one’s job as a software developer is to understand the codebase and how it works and be able to fix bugs and add features without breaking other things in the process or compromising quality or security.
If you’re not doing that and just blindly committing whatever code the LLM generates without so much as glancing at it, you’re not adding any value and there’s a good chance that with a little initial guidance, the janitor could perform your prompt-jockeying about as well.
What is the value proposition of the managers? In the old times, it was mostly managing the human aspects of development. At least in my experience, managers wouldn't know what to prompt, even if they could.
Now it's Claude Code and ever so occasionally Codex.
I never do work in IDEs by hand anymore. I stopped writing code entirely in February and I will likely never write code again unless my internet dies.
I need a JetBrains-level AST navigator that focuses on high level code navigation and understanding, and moreover on code and architectural review. I need to quickly scan diffs and quickly see architecture at a glance.
Of course even that too many eventually fall away.
I rarely open RustRover these days. I could never have predicted that.
I "code" using Codex but I still use PHPStorm for checking diffs, database access, reviewing PRs, and the debugger. The value proposition has changed, not disappeared.
I've been paying for the all products pack for 8 years now, but at my latest job all code is generated, and I think this will be the reality at most companies. I won't extend this year
If you've been on HN long enough you recognize that the OP is quite prolific in making absurd claims about AI: infamously predicted that children would be making professional, Hollywood level films by the end of 2025, and is now spending their time building the 5000th barely functional clone of Adobe tools[0]. It's probably a little unfair, but they are bold claims from someone who really does not have the ground to be making bold claims.
You don't get the nuance that there are people who enjoy the writing the code part more than they enjoy the handholding and hitting enter on a prompt part. And they write it fast or concise enough to not need to prompt engineer bicker with a machine.
And as soon as an edge case pops up that your model will have never been able to hear about because it hasn't been released publicly, security vuln, whatever, you'll get a "fix" confidently hallucinated at you and be none the wiser.
There's going to be a huge pendulum swing with all the llm zombies and sanewashing it like this isn't helping anyone.
All of this just oozes junior engineer if you're even employed in the field at all.
I do get that some people enjoy the manual process more than they enjoy building the product.
It doesn't give you the right to insult my expertise, and frankly your arguments sound like things that one would make up despite little actual experience using AI to develop software.
How can one insult something one knows nothing about. Tell us what sort of expert are you instead of patting yourself on the back. Anybody can come here and claim they're bigger experts than you. Will you believe them? Maybe you're a big ego with rubbish "engineering" skills.
A large percentage thinks that the current status quo is how things will look over the next decade. They don't think everything is fundamentally and irreversibly changing.
Nobody is coming out of this with the same career. The whole world is being rewired. Some people really don't like that.
I'm just glad we're out of the web platform / cellphone incrementalism era. I wish more of my career could have been spent with this rocket fuel. It's dangerous and hypergolic, but it's fun and flashy and capable of pulling us out of this gravity well.
A bit tongue-in-cheek but I'm amazed by people that don't open an IDE or look at code. Are you paid to press enter at anything that Claude present to you?
Personally I usually use Claude inside the Jetbrain's IDE terminal, even if I code by hand obviously less. I still like using the diff, navigation, quick access to any file path for my prompt etc but maybe that won't last.
(edit: although I currently use an old perpetual fallback license because I didn't like the last price increase especially as they slowly remove what I like in the UI)
You will be surprised by how many professional software engineers don't read their code or care these days.
I have seen a bubble sort function in a PR from an engineer with 10 years of experience. Meanwhile sort from standard library is easily available with one single line.
The bar has become as low as "it works" without considering what's in the code or whether the entire feature should even exist at all.
P.S. that same engineer sent out a PR of 200-file feature. The PR is so large that it freezes the latest MacBook Pro if you try to read it. Nobody reviewed it and he merged it himself. Nobody uses that feature, and nobody in the teams wants to maintain it. Now we are considering scrapping it.
It’s so easy to generate a pile of crap now that it “just works” as you say.
Quality, maintainability, simplicity, understandability, flexibility etc all still matter at $DAY_JOB, where you’ve got paying customers. We’ve got a responsibility to write good software that adds to people’s lives.
I’d recommend to try to raise the bar. Commit messages written by humans, no PRs above a certain size, any PR needs an introduction / explanation by author first for the reviewers.
When you get paid to care, you will care. Unfortunately, no one cares, they just want results, any result. Bubble sort will do, especially for low volume tasks.
Use the time you save by not caring, to do other fun stuff.
The thing is: people quickly discover that even mediocre LLM-code with a mediocre LLM-review, is still better quality than what they hand wrote and hand-reviewed.
So it's already an improvement. Should it be manually read, comprehended, reviewed? Probably. But they can get to an improvement over what they did 2 years ago, with basically no effort. And then they can get a little bit further, with massive effort?
The "LLM-yolo" is a big knee in the cost/benefit curve. It's an improvement over their "old code". The only drawback is: it's still containing bugs, and now no one understands them. But that's not hitting them until that code has aged somewhat, so a year or two down the line.
> The thing is: people quickly discover that even mediocre LLM-code with a mediocre LLM-review, is still better quality than what they hand wrote and hand-reviewed.
If mediocre code is better quality than what you wrote by hand, you've quickly discovered that you're incompetent.
> If mediocre code is better quality than what you wrote by hand
Most code I have seen and reviewed over my 25+ year programmer life has been no worse than mediocre LLM code.
It's not a massive sample, but to me it suggests, most code programmers write, is somewhere between bad and mediocre.
And here's the appeal of the models: if what you used to produced was bad-to-mediocre, and you can now do slightly better for much cheaper, that's a huge win.
> And here's the appeal of the models: if what you used to produced was bad-to-mediocre, and you can now do slightly better for much cheaper, that's a huge win.
And the guy you were responding to is seeing people produce worse code with LLMs (e.g. senior engineers pushing non-library bubble sort implementations, like they're in a high school programming class).
And if you're somehow right, it's not a "huge win" for you. It's a sign you're personally providing little value to the business, and sooner or later you'll need to find a new career.
I just look at my own diffs in a draft GHE PR and iterate with my agent on Github. This is often a much better UX than trying to make sure every single linter or thing is consistent between my machine and the CI machine. We do use Docker but it's still just easier to do it all on the CI box / Github.
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.
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 think you're paid to deliver. Lots of developers for decades have delivered crap that looks good on the surface and is otherwise unmaintainable. Now we're reaching the point where "everyone can code" and review queues are getting too long, with the result of many PRs being yoloed.
This of course varies by company but this is clearly where it's headed: bot pushes, bot reviews, you look at the PR title and click merge.
I keep lazygit open next to each Claude/Codex session that's working on a change, but over time scrolling the changes has gone from necessary to just out of curiosity.
At this point of 2026, if you're reading code and still catching things, then the problem was before the code was written. You should have decided more high level preferences like invariants before the work began.
I am mostly happy with Neovim with an LSP integration. I'm not going to say it's "lighter" or anything because rust-analyzer isn't exactly "small", but it is a simpler, and IMO "cleaner" interface. Also completely free.
I do look at the code and have to correct Claude most of the time, but I've noticed that with AI-assisted coding, I mostly look at the diffs when i'm inside IntelliJ. I don't need a pricey full-fledged IDE to just look at files and their diffs.
Personally I don't use CLI anymore, Codex app is very good and it starts to look like how IDEs will be in the future. You can review code in a GitHub style diff and leave inline comments (super useful), have multiple agents work in parallel with or without worktrees, plus there is very good code navigation (especially if you ask followup clarification questions that will link to other parts of code).
Related, it amazes me how many seasoned developers don't know how to do basic tasks in their editor/IDE with the keyboard and instead rely on their mouse. Most people don't need to be super users, but it baffles me when I see a developer who hasn't at least learned the keyboard shortcuts for opening files and jumping to functions/methods, etc.
I’m only a mild keyboard user in IDEs, but I think I’d go mad if the keyboard shortcuts for quick open, jump to line, jump to function, etc suddenly disappeared.
I’m sure there are people who aren’t looking at the code at all. But for those that are I guess I’m wondering why bother with an IDE anymore?
I’m finding I can just review everything I need to with a text editor like Neovim now. Even GitHub review is probably good enough for people.
JetBrains still has best tooling for previewing changes, resolving conflicts, git integration. I get that vibe coders not necessarily need all that but it's the best class tooling money can buy.
> Are you paid to press enter at anything that Claude present to you?
I mean, sometimes work falls exactly at the tool's strongest suit/match.
I am trying to think of what a comparison here could be but, for example, I remember early days in my career where pretty much 80% of the work was writing boilerplate and using scaffolding/generator tools, plugging them in the various plumbing and pipes of the stack, and just ticking boxes through Jira
Lots of "CRUD" and/or similar "recipe" type of work that was really just turning your brain off and needed that grunt labour force
You may ask: why is the person even needed?
My answer is the same as before: I don't know, I didn't know why were they needed back them either, felt like all could be automated as well, maybe the cost to invest in automating and mapping that all out was never a priority and the ROI math was "good enough" for the business while leadership had other north stars they were worried about?
Using a CLI coding agent in your IDE's terminal is a terrible way to view conversation history and works poorly for organizing multiple conversations.
It only fits a hands-on, merely AI-assisted development approach, on one feature at a time, that is not typically productive compared to agentic development.
You might disagree, but you'll find that the proponents of the hands-on approach are losing ground every month as AI gets better at working autonomously.
Except surrendering cognitive control over the system being built makes things worse.
Claude constantly makes poor architectural decisions, adds unnecessary and costly checks, makes wrong assumptions, etc.
Doesn't take the value out of LLMs writing code, but they need to be properly steered and reasoned with. How will you do so if you don't even browse the code it generates.
I always suspect that the people all in fully agentic codig like this are mostly creating prototypes, half-assed copies of existing products, etc.
I'm slowly accepting that this is the new reality.
I've spent 1 month between august and early september writing some of the best code of my life. LLMs only provided feedback, I wrote all the code manually, still remember it by heart.
I was very delighted by the many architectural iterations that led to it. 9 files, around 10k lines of code (of those, 7k tests).
By the end of super funny exercise I kinda realized that if I had the same feature vibe coded it would've been better. I would've done much more and progressed more feature wise.
I just feel stupid hand writing my code.
It doesn't help that I work with stellar individual contributors. All of my team mates (except a junior) are either all former faang or contributed to projects we all use (from the TypeScript compiler to Linux). And they are all abandoning if not spearheading the abandonment of reading code. I'm talking people that truly loved the technical aspect of it and excelled in it.
I just feel stupid, like I'm carrying a weight that I should abandon.
Comments like yours feel would've made sense 6 months ago, but now are crumbling.
Software is essentially so cheap and throwaway nowadays that letting LLMs write it is imperative. When you find your use cases you start reviewing it or rewriting it thoroughly.
I’ve been using agents to do the code for me, but I explicitly tells it to iterate in small changes that I can review and approve as it happens, not after a 2k lines diff. It makes me understand what’s being made, and test every little change before we move on to change other parts of the code. Also helps you correct any misunderstanding right from the start.
When you give a ticket to a jr developer, do you look over their shoulder the entire time they write the code? Or do pause to answer questions, give feedback on how to go about a task, and review their results?
If you need to review every edit that claude wants to make what's the point in using it? We're now treating it basically like a junior dev. Do our best to make sure that it's on the right path (leaning hard on the superpowers plugin) then let it work and look at the result. Though even that review is heavily AI assisted now. Our leadership has mandated that everything that can be done by AI, should be done by AI. We've only been in that mode for a couple of months but I'm starting to think that it's plausible with proper human steering and oversight.
I'm paid to produce software that has features and works.
Nobody cares how I get there or how ugly the code is. They care how fast I can do it and how reliable the software is.
I look at code sometimes, in down time, to see what's been done terribly by AI, and to fix it and hopefully fix the process so that things don't get done terribly in that particular way in the future.
It's not about "how ugly the code is". Poor solutions heaped on top of poor solutions can result in a system with real users and intractable issues. I'm all for AI, but not reviewing the code seems likely to cause issues long term.
Well, I used to pay more attention to the code, and then I found that if I spent more tokens having the AI review its work than actually creating new features, I was able to get more, better work done.
The AI review stage is where I've found prompting matters a lot more than that initial prototyping phase. I've iterated on prompts and tooling that help the AI keep the codebase clean-ish.
> Well, I used to pay more attention to the code, and then I found that if I spent more tokens having the AI review its work than actually creating new features, I was able to get more, better work done.
Of course it did. Because reviewing code thoroughly is harder than writing it.
Writing only consists of "making sure it does the task", reviewer have to understand code first, check if it does the task, then check whether it doesn't affect something else negatively (and it can be meta things like "doesn't adhere to project style", even if technical side is correct)
Whats your YOE, like when did you enter tech as a SWE?
This shouldn't be normalized for you yet unless you're at a faang pushing this at the edge and new to the field, cause this isn't what we used to do 2 years ago.
If you're happy with the ai slop $$$ job more power to you but that isn't the entire field and there used to be (and hopefully still are) good and fun engineering jobs.
Contrary to popular normie belief, no not everyone wants to work at the Metas and OpenAIs and for good reason.
edit: Guys a literal business owner writing code for his own business, christ, what a waste of my time. So instead of hiring actual engineers you try to make it sound like you're employed as a software engineer and your experience is remotely normal. You are the literal business owner not filling seats because you're using AI.
"I'm paid to just shut up and code, baby!"
Yeah, that isn't a real SWE job, bud, don't make comments like you're in the trenches.
YOE is ~30, from my first PHP app to present. I've spent somewhere between 5 and 80 hours a week coding for the past 30 years, mostly self-employed, writing tools and creating custom CNC machines/robots for my own business, but more recently doing same thing for a company as a full time employee.
I still get to do some coding, where there are safety-critical production systems, but the work is mostly tooling that gets us to that point or supports the business otherwise.
It's an awesome job. Couldn't be funner, pretty much, except on data collection days. I get high level tasks, or come up with my own, and find or build solutions - no more running a whole business, doing production, keeping books, shipping orders, doing customer support - I only do the stuff I like.
Wow, this really sucks. With all the money flocking to companies that trained LLMs on stolen data, we may lose the only set of IDEs that offer high quality professional development tools
I'm surprised that the word "only" still applies. I have my laments about JB (PyCharm / RR): Mainly centered around performance. Yet it has no competition! Whenever I read about VsCode, or Zed as alternatives, I feel disbelief, as they're not in the same league.
Zed in particular, from the way it was described upon release, sounded like it should have been a JB competitor. Reality: It can't even move functions or structs!
I love JetBrains. For many years I was a happy subscriber to the All Products Pack, paid for out of my own pocket. I would have said that you'd have to pry my JetBrains from my cold, dead hands.
A year or two ago, I finally gave up:
1. The IDE was simply too slow - notably slower and "heavier" than VS Code in particular - and it seemed to regularly get slower.
2. Bugs - from the complex (TypeScript constructs that tsc itself handles just fine while WebStorm's code analysis kept throwing false positives on) to the trivial and silly (failing to properly handle the <col> tag in React), and often staying open for years.
Meanwhile, VS Code just kept getting better, addressing the complaints I had with it while staying fast.
I work almost exclusively in TypeScript these days; as other commenters pointed out, I'm sure that JetBrains products are still great for other languages.
And their refactoring tools remain second to none. I'm profoundly disappointed in our industry that the VS Code developers apparently looked at JetBrains, with its arsenal of expertly crafted, deterministic, testable refactorings, and said, "Nope, we'd rather make everyone use inherently random language models for anything more complex than Rename Symbol."
It's not even close. vscode can approximate JB IDEs but that takes pulling in plugins on your own, managing their configuration, and adapting when the setup inevitably breaks. JB IDEs bake in everything you can get via vscode plugins with documentation, a cohesive experience, and regular maintenance to keep them working for you. Concrete examples that are better in JB land for me: git conflict resolution, refactoring (in numerous ways), jumping to definitions, finding usages (especially on Python projects).
That's always been my experience. Not even close. One gives you legos that lets you make a plastic toy, and the other is an industrial machine shop for code.
I thought maybe I was holding VSCode wrong, though.
> I thought maybe I was holding VSCode wrong, though.
Likewise (Same with zed). I've given them a thorough try several times, assuming I was holding it wrong as you say based on conversations with others who use them effectively. I've reached the conclusion you say here each time.
Code intelligence (find usages, go to definition, refactor/rename/move, etc.) and debugging are on another level - more powerful, more reliable, with more edge-cases covered.
At least, that was so in dynamic languages, like Python, and PHP, last I checked.
For dotnet, Rider runs rings around VSCode. Even using the Resharper plugin, VSCode is nowhere near the same functionality. I even use Rider above Visual Studio because it works way better for mobile and cross platform. VSCode runs okay on the same hardware as Rider, but it is all too manual to configure. VS2026 is a horrible bloated pig that constantly grinds to a halt on the same hardware.
When have you tried VS last? Since they went multi core, it’s usually very fast and it’s mostly R# slowing it down (though I read that improved, dunno).
Just feels like they've been making all the wrong decisions. Quality has been really lackluster, and their attempts to hop onto the AI train have been as annoying as they have been bad. CoPilot sucked. Their own AI coding models suck.
The redesign they've gone for also seems like a supremely weird choice. It's like they're trying to be more like VS Code, when their probably biggest selling point was that unlike VS Code, they offered a full and traditional IDE experience.
Their trajectory has been a deeply questionable mix of change for the sake of change and nervously doing what everyone else is doing.
There are even areas in which some of those best IntelliJ IDEs.
One such thing that Xcode has that IntelliJ doesn’t is per-pane history. In Xcode hitting back/forward navigates history for your focused editor pane whereas IntelliJ’s navigates history across all editor panes.
This might sound like a minor difference, but Xcode’s way gets me to where I want to go more quickly most of the time because I’m not having to wade through the likely-irrelevant history of the other panes. It’s a frequent frustration whenever I have to use an IntelliJ IDE.
Mostly constrained to a single ecosystem and dev/deployment platform - a platform that has never been particularly great for development and has been made vastly less so in the recent years.
Happy to hate on MS as much as the next guy but VSCode is pretty much the Chrome of the IDE world at this point, that might be what parent was alluding to (since I'd struggle to defend any other Microsoft software).
It's got an editor, a debugger, code intelligence, a debugger, terminal, task running, test explorer, refactoring tools, project management, and so on. What's an IDE if not a text editor with bells and whistles?
It's almost as if a company can have good and bad products...
Microsoft has had a very long reputation (for good reason) for having good developer tooling, even if Windows was not particularly developer friendly...
It's purely management fault, it happened around 2022-2023. They had all the chances to become a great agentic IDE/harness at some point, if they would start in time, support plugin developers, allocate a proper team instead of 2 people and some semi-random internships. A lot of users were questioning this publicly and privately with them, we all knew how it will end this way. JetBrains lost, no one wants their Junie in 2026 (and didn't want in 2024-2025, whatever was the name of the integration at that time, it was awful). I was on Ultimate Plan since 2012, appx. I quit entirely in 2024. They asked to answer a few surveys over the last few years - even the questions there were far from reality. RIP, JetBrains, it's mostly unrecoverable at this point.
Their management decisions are strange, right. They had a nice tool called Upsource, we used it for code reviews. Then they sunset it and told us to use JetBrains Space instead. After we migrated to JetBrains Space, they said, oh wait, we sunset it too. So we had to migrate to GitLab. And now, with AI-assisted coding, I don't even need their IDE anymore, because I mostly look at diffs. And that kinda brings us back to Upsource. That thing could have been grown to support AI-assisted development, like, get rid of all the heavy IDE stuff, and just have a place for code reviewing agents' output and merging things. Somewhat like GitLab Lite but fully agentic-oriented. I think it would have covered 99% of our use cases.
I heard rumors JetBrains started going downhill around 2022-2023 because they severed ties with employees in Russia's St. Petersburg, which housed their R&D and all (although many employees were relocated but who knows).
CC + my own custom tools, I don't see any reason to pay for devtools in 2026 (same as trying to monetize them, or even just share/distribute). My first custom solution was built on top of JB's core in early 2024, btw, but not any more. JetBrains "suite" doesn't really lock you in, it's more like "aura" of the product itself that made me attached for almost 13 years (I never was able to switch, I still think VS Code is so ugly and counter-intuitive in comparison with JB).
I still haven’t found an IDE that I feel really helps me develop with AI better than the command line. I have built bespoke tools that work the way I want. But a really good integrated solution would blow my current workflow out of the water. No one seems to have built an IDE with deep support for worktrees, parallel session, walking me thru diffs, and optionally handing control back to me to write the occasional hand-written code myself. Plus most of my work is done on mobile, so Jetbrains has an amazing opportunity…but they seem to be chasing the competition instead of focusing on their moat.
Right now there's a huge friction with IDEs, that if I have it open while claude is working on something, then any caches it has get stale very quickly, and it churns processing trying to keep up with edits.
Any leverage that claude could benefit from LSPs or language/AST MCPs is undone by that tooling not being able to keep up or stay fresh, so the IDE just "runs hot" for no purpose.
Which means I'm incentivised to close my IDE while claude is working, and now I've got used to not looking at the code.
Like you, I really want a system that works better. I want claude to search and edit through better tooling, it would be faster, more accurate, and should in theory be able to leverage compilers to apply edits better and more accurately.
I don't want claude wasting an awful lot of time grepping for things that a compiler cache can answer, but if that compiler cache can't keep up then it's actively harmful.
I'm sure there must be a better way, there must be a way to have smarter more change-aware cache invalidation, and smarter more cache-aware claude tool use, but so far none has happened.
Long term I'm sure the pairing will emerge, but unfortunately I don't think that's going to come from the IDE vendor side, it'll have to come out of some harness research lab, where Anthropic or a competitor finds a way to reliably leverage this stuff for a speed and accuracy boost.
It's completely bonkers to me that an LLM can almost "natively" read profiler output, but doing so involves vast amounts of text and context ingestion, when there are real tools sitting there that it ignores in preference for either reading vast amounts or iffy python one-shot scripts to parse stuff.
Maybe something like delta? This is still pretty new from the folks that make Zed, but looks promising and would address some of the things you mention https://delta.dev/
Sublime was/is still the best, unfortunately had to finally abandon it due to lack of first-class agent support. Hard to find something that emphasizes core text editing first and that doesn't constantly have some new update to apply on start that may break or change something.
It feels like JB is trying that, but it hasn't materialized in a way I understand yet; they have a handful of AI tools, and I don't fully understand them at this point, nor how they integrate and what roles they fill. (June, Air, AI asssistant, AI autocomplete)
I'm not sure what the problem is after rereading their post? All you need to support everything they said is a remote connection to a heirarchy of worktree-supporting sessions per project, with each having a proper scrolling feed of agent actions taken and your input box.
Cursor has support for work trees, parallel chats, will walk you through diffs line by line. This is what I primarily use for the walking through diffs feature. If I need something to just throw over the wall, I fire up claude.
IMO there’s a ton of room for innovation in the IDE space.
It looks like software dev is going the way of natural language as the final spec that humans see. Regardless of whether this is a good idea or not, it’s happening. My boss asked us not to write any code manually starting in Jan, and now has hinted that we should stop reviewing code too.
Natural language as spec obviously has a ton of limitations. And here an opinionated IDE that can define this sort of workflow better is primed to gain a lot of market share, devs clearly aren’t fussed about switching between IDEs right now.
I should be able to, for example, click on a plantuml diagram and see what the endpoint definitions are,
See where the request schemas are.
If I have Agents.md files scattered across my codebase I would like my IDE to help me manage them
I don't think this is related to AI. Pre-AI I thought for many years that they have spread themselves too wide and thin. A new IDE pretty much every six months. Unsustainable whilst ignoring their existing customers and products. I think it's inevitable that they've ended up here.
I think they've started to realise that and are trying to reign it in with 'Fleet' and 'Code With Me' deprecations.
This tracks with what I've observed, as a fan-and-sometimes-user. They look to be funding a skunk works - which started with their version of Cursor (Jules or something), which wasn't great.
They are working on a cli agent; I tried it, but it silently injected hooks into all my other cli agents to re-target JB inference APIs, which caused me to burn through my JB tokens in like two minutes and b0rked all my running agent sessions.
They are working on a spec-driven thing, which I attempted to try but getting burned by the cli thing I abandoned it. It looks really interesting - it's a meta-harness, built and shipped with one of the Spec-Something frameworks, where you define your own specs for your projects, kinda like snake-eating-it-own-tail-of-specs. If spec-driven is The Future, they are at least trying.
There have been a few other things I can't recall, but my observation is that they are taking generative AI seriously as an existential threat, and probably (as another poster here put it) "heating the office burning tokens".
Long time JB user here, and I mean long time. The past year I have been using claude in the JB terminal but nothing, and I mean nothing new has come of it in that year. Stuck in a tiny terminal window, opening files every so often. A couple months ago I switched back to iTerm2, full screen and use sublime to open the odd file every so often. So this makes 100% sense. They need to do a better job integrating with agents and not pushing their own.
So a stable company like JetBrains, which sells developer tools and has extensive experience in compilers, ended up with a net financial loss. Meanwhile, Cursor—a startup only a few years old, founded by students, built on a VS Code fork, and primarily powered by OpenAI's API—was valued at $60 billion.
This financial loss is a report at a point in time about that point in time. A company's valuation is also reported at a point in time but it represents an aggregation of how much profit the company might generate across time (please forgive the layman's understanding). They are apples and oranges.
Hopefully this is a wake-up call for them to drop the AI hype-chasing and refocus on making the best IDEs for us dinosaurs who, for whatever crazy reason, still code by hand and appreciate solid (deterministic) tools to help us out.
On a very related note, I'm probably very late to this discussion, but has anyone else noticed autocomplete in JetBrains products has gotten significantly worse after the advent of LLMs? It would previously take into account type signatures and all kinds of context, now it's clearly just a very minimal next token generator, often producing code that doesn't even compile.
The real surprise is how small their balance sheet is given they're such a well known and loved name. 16m CZK is 0.7m USD annual revenue.
There are companies where you'd rather be the owner, and others where you'd rather be an employee, or a customer. I think the JetBrain's customers are the real winners in this one.
I cancelled my JetBrains subscription a year ago when they announced price increases.
The quality of their software has been falling despite all recurring revenue. I used JetBrains for almost a decade because it just worked. JetBrains Toolbox is some of the worst software I've used, it causes more problems that it solves for me.
Needing to install a different IDE per language is also something I dislike about JetBrains, but not a deal breaker.
JetBrains is a privately held s.r.o. (LLC equivalent in the Czech Republic), I wonder where have Helgi Library gather so much detailed financial data from about them?
Its pretty sad because JetBrains products are great ive been using them for a while and its even free for students. VSC is great but i feel like JB products are more refined since I code in Go and Python.
I still love my IDEA & Rider, but a lot of my attention has moved to VSCode with Claude Code plugin. The Claude plugin/tooling for these IDE's is abysmal in comparison (talking strictly about the Claude Code experience here - not the bundlende AI Assistant.
I am not moving away from JetBrains anytime soon, but it does gets harder to justify when I spend considerable time in a competing offering that has better experience and is free...
That’s interesting, as we have just completed a huge migration of our CI/CD infrastructure off Teamcity, for plenty of reasons but “we’re paying a shit ton of money for this and it’s a pain in the ass” was a major one.
They seem to be very bloated and unable to modernize their product lines.
I've been thinking about doing the same, what did you migrate to? I was thinking GitHub actions but the outage yesterday reinforced that it might be a bad idea.
We migrated to buildkite, as it allowed self hosted agents and lots of “building blocks” to extend stuff ourselves.
One of the things we really use heavily is dynamic pipelines, as we have a lot of different stuff.
In teamcity, we had close to 1k build configs, and were able to replace this with about 20 dynamic pipelines in buildkite.
We did need to do a bunch of plumbing, but in this age of AI it means our developers don’t have to rely on devops anymore to get their stuff done to make all this work.
One of the problems was that our devs were “afraid” to alter teamcity build configs, as it all was more fragile than it should be and they were afraid to break stuff.
Teamcity allows for customization with plugins, but all that is so bloated with either Java or Kotlin and requires a shitton of domain specific knowledge to pull off.
Buildkite is much simpler with YAML and their plugin infrastructure which is effectively just hooks into scripts. It’s well designed.
I agree, build kite really blew me away. I know everyone tried to make simple yet powerful abstractions but it usually fails; build kite was the opposite where it was surprisingly better than I expected
First, revenue is growing, assets - too. I believe company does some money burning to compete. According to the prev years nett income, they should have collected a reasonable amount of money so a little money burn doesn't harm.
Second, the Gross Profit is only 72.1m whereas the Revenue is 675m.
That means, 600m is somewhere in the COGS. Not sure how to read this.
Around a year ago, the org I was working for ditched jetbrains (including teamcity) due to alleged Russian links of some of the founders/owners of jetbrains.
Never looked into it further, but might be a factor...
Jetbrains lost our entire (small) team a few years back when they completely neglected (no, to minimal progress for years) their typehint support in PyCharm. I think they now finally have caught up somewhat judging from the updated on all the issues in youtrack I'm still subscribed to.
You'll be surprised (or not) to find out a lot of people aren't using anything. Claude gets asked to build it, then some other clown uses their copy of Claude to do the PR review and then it gets merged.
Their revenue is increasing, but their profits have been on a decline despite increased revenue. The table on that page only goes back to 2021, but the trend of increasing revenue and decreasing profits has been going on at least that long. I don’t think ai would have been a factor that far back. Even though github copilot did launch sometime around then, I doubt it was much of a factor.
I have no idea what that contains, but it appears to be a rather large dip, compared to previous years. Overall it's not really that interesting without context and commentary from JetBrains.
I find IntelliJ IDEA a great tool, even for my fully vibecoded apps. I edit the READMEs in it, look at the version history, use it for debugging, for builds, and so on.
My guess is that people aren't abandoning their IDEs. Their market is probably growing. I suspect they're burning money on subsidized inference, just like everybody else.
Like or not, LLM are getting better at debugging than humans... Not sure for how long will companies will keep paying for IDEs (which, tbf, are peanuts compared to the LLM cost).
They keep trying to bite into AI but they should focus on making their tools more stable and should have invested more into Kotlin Native, could of had a fully native IDE and tooling by now and purged reliance on the JVM.
Cause Cursor was so massive? JetBrains is not just some random niche company, they're used in 88 companies out of the Fortune 100, that's nothing to sneeze at.
I don't think they can compete with AI IDEs. They should maybe focus on the niche that they are good at, and completely get rid of anything ML/AI related. It's going to be a lot cheaper.
Manually refactor code in days if need be, when you have something specific in mind and intend a particular result.
'refactor' isn't just a blender. If I wanted agentic coding I would just do that. I'm quite happy for other people to so completely entangle themselves in agentic coding that they can't get out. Please proceed.
to add: I'm a paying JetBrains customer, but they could lose me if they vibecode themselves into a pile of slop. I'm not sure they're doing that, even if they're dabbling in it. I think there's still expertise there.
This would make sense for me, as a long time Jetbrains user and not desiring to use AI for anything apart from single line code completion, which the current Jetbrains tools do quite well.
I have used their support before, to be extremely impressed. This is an area that they could differentiate themselves in.
They could establish a foothold in AI accelerated development but they sadly aren't doing it, instead focusing on "developing agents" (aka openclaw/pi/codex/claude simulacrum #9998).
I’m trying to contextualize this information. JetBrains isn’t publicly traded best as I can tell, and these numbers come from other public filings:
> Figures are the company's own (unconsolidated) statutory statements filed with the Czech business register…
Are these as reliable as the U.S. 10K or its European equivalent?
I assume that a company like JetBrains would be investing in shifting products around A.I., so it doesn’t seem too surprising that they don’t report a profit for 2025.
then Sbirka listin and download the filings. It's all in Czech so put it through GPT for translation
Summary:
JetBrains s.r.o. went negative because a large foreign-exchange loss overwhelmed a much smaller operating profit. The report explicitly identifies CZK 1.516 billion of currency losses caused by the Czech koruna strengthening against major foreign currencies. But “it was just accounting” would be incomplete: operating profit also fell 63.2%. These accounts use Czech accounting rules, not IFRS.
So two separate things happened: operations deteriorated by CZK 1.291 billion, and the financial result deteriorated by CZK 2.016 billion. Lower taxes cushioned the fall rather than causing it. Approximately 61% of the deterioration before tax came from the financial section and 39% from operations.
For cash generation, the reported operating cash flow is positive—but requires caution. It increased from CZK 5.059 billion to CZK 6.353 billion. However, the 2025 statement includes CZK 6.672 billion of positive net working-capital adjustments, while its before-working-capital subtotal is negative CZK 60.926 million. The positive final figure therefore should not be read as CZK 6.353 billion of recurring cash earnings.
Removing only that disclosed currency loss would produce CZK 1,191.121 million of profit before tax. That is a mechanical sensitivity calculation—not an IFRS profit figure or a fully currency-neutral result. It leaves derivative gains and all other reported amounts unchanged, and it should not be treated as adjusted after-tax profit. The report says the 2025 “other financial income” line consists mainly of derivative income.
I would love if the Jetbrains IDE's got really good agent integration,
all their code analysis could have amazing synergy with LLM's,
Unfortunatly for now I disabled all AI features as it was slowing my IDE (JetBrains) to a crawl.
It isn't as much the price of a license as much as the time it takes to get approval for newer engineers and contractors. You can just say, "we use vs code with these extensions and wsl2" and the discussion is over.
This along with stack overflow seems to be the end of an era. Stack overflow had my back and JetBrains was like a super magical tool that I could tackle code bases with.
Unfortunate because they make great products, but also expected given AI. A bit like Nokia, they're a great company that didn't do anything particularly wrong but they got swept by a superior technology.
An IDE connects a human coder to the development process. If the role of that coder changes in that process, the IDE connection is not going to be as heavy as it used to be.
Either a whole lot of money is about to be sucked out of markets or money is about to massively devalue. This is the bill coming due for the zero interest rate years, seen from one company's vantage point.
It's much more work to make a cross platform GUI app with C++, even if your toolkit is cross platform like Qt. Different compiler tool chains, different system level API's, ARM vs x64 etc.
This is why we see so many Electron apps these days (though Jetbrains was shipping IDE's before electron existed).
I am a long time JetBrains subscriber to the all products pack. Their response to recent AI events has been extremely lackluster and I've given them this feedback directly, in feedback and otherwise.
I doubt I will remain a subscriber for the entirety of next year.
Let's look at their AI product, it suuuuucks. They released it, and it literally did not function. I purchased it, and it kept giving me licensing errors. Contacted support and they couldn't tell me anything. Okay, cool, cancel it and refund me. This is useless.
That was a while ago. Today, it still sucks. AI Chat is a bolted-on afterthought that looks like a hackathon project and functions like one. Isn't deeply embedded in the editors. Clunky. Slow. Ugly to look at. Doesn't integrate nicely with all the tools. No native AI plugins, you're forced into their garbage.
10yr+ All Products Pack subber as well, cancelled in August.
They really didn't do well with AI integration the past few years. When Cursor was all the rage, JetBrains was pushing their own service whose pricing wasn't transparent and just didn't hold up to SotA. I'd still agree that using Codex or Claude from CLI is a better user experience.
Yet, looks like their revenue is up. Wonder where they're investing.
It's amazing that it even costs extra. Basic functionality shouldn't cost an extra fee, period.
I'm paying hundreds of dollars to use the IDE. The least they could do is integrate well with other harnesses (like every other text editor in the world does).
No disrespect meant, but I don't see how companies like JetBrains can survive (and I've read their financial statements, their revenue growth is still decent). All their revenue comes from products and services that are effectively a long-form agentic session, proven by how many OSS replicas of their stack is out there. Their Junie agent (itself a replica of all other agents on the market) can ITSELF be replicated in a few dozen prompts, as evidenced by the 1000+ GitHub agent repos out there, most of whom are operated by a single college student. What's worse is that JetBrains' primary customer base is supposed to be composed of technical users and developers, the exact cohort that should be skilled enough to use LLMs to replicate their services for effectively zero cost. I guess the only thing that's saving them is inertia and goodwill.
All the air is getting sucked out of software companies due to AI, I'm seeing it happen in a number of places. Though in this case it may be due to their own AI investment on internal projects.
why this is a surprise? I have 0 reasons to buy IDE in 2026.
Their main moat was smart refactor, and a few other nice tools to debug. regardless of what you think about coding is done, agents and your harness is the best tool. I heard they doing business accelerator to find a new business ideas. But as a company, hardly imagine anyone buying expensive IDE in 2 years. Why?
IDEs are on a steep decline, so not so surprising. I've disabled most code extensions from vscode and find myself using multiple terminals and the built in git diff UI. I barely see the code _as a whole_, only care about the _code_ changes.
edit: added the extra words + I must mention I'm talking about legacy maintenance projects
Yep, I don't remember the last time I opened up an IDE anymore. I mainly built my own open source AI coding orchestrator lol: https://github.com/saadnvd1/agent-os
The landscape is changing significantly, and I think these types of tools will become more popular.
Yep. Especially considering their primary userbase are technically apt developers, there's zero reason to use any of their products. Especially given how quickly the landscape is changing.
All the death knell comments - Is no one looking at the revenue line? Revenue still trending the same. Costs presumably haven't skyrocketed. They've invested in something big. Thats probably a good thing, and often needed to evolve.
Yeah look at the details below. Revenue is up 6% (which is not amazing but still growth). But staff expenses are up 34.2%. And the real big hint is "Cash Flow From Investing" plunging from -83 million $USD to -469. That's massive. They're staffing up and investing in... something.
> and investing in... something.
Reads like aimlessly burning whatever they felt they were able to burn without existential risk on some "also ran" LLM sinkhole.
In other words: nothing to see here, same as everybody else.
I still have this naive notion that we don't need LLMs for code generation and editing. Does a system need the knowledge of the full works of Shakespeare to be able to output Javascript?
Maybe people smarter than me know better but couldn't there be a middle ground where an IDE/Editor has an embedded engine (doesn't need to be a full-on LLM) that doesn't require external tool calls and token spend?
If an organization is paying $2400/year per developer for tokens and a highly intelligent editor/IDE comes around that charges $1000/yr and gets more output at a fixed cost, its a no-brainer of a decision.
> "Does a system need the knowledge of the full works of Shakespeare to be able to output Javascript?"
If the implementation brief says "attempting a reconnect in this handler would be a wild goose chase", the model needs to know enough Shakespeare, at least indirectly, to understand that expression...
You know what, considering there was a recent "small" open weights LLM released recently that meets 90% of my coding needs I'm inclined to agree.
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next - relatively small, it runs on 6 6 year old GPUs on my home PC happily running 5 simultaneous 262k sessions with additional 10 cached in RAM (bought back when you didn't have to remortgage your house for Ram) and it has been the first local model that is not a toy.
But there is a class of problems where I still reach for Anthropic's fable...
However, I have a hunch bordering with certainty Anthropic is achieving such great results by doing a lot of harness tricks.
For example opus 4.8, is not much better on coding than before mentioned Qwen model, but gets amazing results on factual knowledge stuff (the knowing all works of Shakespeare thing). How hard would it be to add a general knowledge RAG to requests that contain relevant questions and beat all benchmarks like that? Not very hard.
So I think there is big innovation to be had in harnesses, routers, inference and so on.
As to money spent on AI per developer my current client (a fortune 200 software company) spends $500 per month. That is $6k a year. A lot more than your examples. And many people run out of their quota pretty quickly.
I was inclined to listen to your take… then you started talking about having 6 graphics cards in your computer and acting like that’s a normal thing that people do…
Forgive my naive understanding of LLMs - but how do you get semantic understanding of a codebase, such that it knows what changes to make/why/where, without a wider understanding of language more broadly?
I'm using the word understanding loosely there, but I couldn't think of another word.
Depends on what exactly you want to change. Lsp can do a lot but only in very simple changes.
Intellij when I used to use it had a lot great features like refactoring, extracting part of code as a function, renaming and creating empty classes/boilerplate but that's it
In current job I can order LLM to take data sink from other endpoint and write new with given URL. It will fetch from endpoint, check what it gives, compare with other and write new sink. Then it needs polishing because it always create something as awful as possible with cloning data all around but the most boring and soul sucking part is done
This is why I am working on https://github.com/spockz/semantic-editor. To bring more powerful editing functionality to agents. In a way that attaches to their chain of thought and deals with their probabilistic framing in json so it all works out cheaper and faster.
It's a totally fair question. I'm personally wondering if there's a half way point. Some kind of structured language that isn't plain English that a "dumb" LLM is able to parse. It could be human written, or it could be written by a "smart" LLM at a greater cost.
Did you learn english or C first?
We’re conditioned to interact with language models as chatbots and in that sense strong language understanding (implicit - some sort of world knowledge), is probably necessary for that?
But I’m sure we can have a small model that’s really strong at programming concepts, JavaScript syntax, and that’s about it. You’d interact with it differently, at specific seams in your code base - review a PR, merge two functions together, investigate these logs.
Or maybe I’m just not adequately absorbing the bitter lesson. Idk
I think the amount of knowledge to correctly work on code is more than you'd think, because at the end of the day writing code without an understanding of the environment it exists in/for is likely to not fit the problem correctly. Maybe it doesn't need knowledge of _Shakespeare_ per se, but if you were working on a virtual tabletop having knowledge of tabletop games can help with identifying the right implementation to use, knowing what kind of constraints to consider, etc.
I think this already happens through Mixture of Experts which is now build in to ost models.
But finding out what an LLM needs to understand from a business side to write your code good, is an otpimzation which no one cares currently.
I'm pretty sure we either stay on big full frontier models for a long time, just use them for everything or we will start to see more and more people doing finetuning/project specific training like java + german + english + business contxt xy;
It will be an indicator for the whole industry.
My gut says the economics, e.g hardware/data center/resource constraints, are going make the economics of small specialized models more attractive. Without any evidence whatsoever, I also think that the big frontier companies will have to de-emphasize chatbots as huge models in favor of chatbots as huge products with a much much more granular mixture of experts approach, but with much smaller models. I’ve been saying for a while now that AI products have to hit the gas on prioritizing product design to reliably solve real people’s problems in predictable-enough ways, because the current approach is only really appealing to enthusiasts, developers, or optimistic managers, and with the kind of money they’re throwing around, that’s not going to work.
I suppose how much literary support you need in your model depends directly on how erudite the comments are.
Would there be problem domains in which the more educated LLM would perform better? Are your names directly related to concepts from said domain,
LLM comments: "I think it may be a potential bug that the sum VATAddedTax gets added to the TaxFreeItems".
I mean it seems a bit unnecessary but also maybe it can help in unexpected ways.
I'm not an expert, but I think that:
1. Storing Shakespeare's work costs almost no $ in regards to disk space.
2. If the prompt doesn't include "Shakespeare" or relevant terms then no regression is performed for that topic and therefore there is no effective token cost.
Someone may correct me, but I think it's not a big $ win to exclude relevant topics from the models' overall capabilities. Instead you'd tune weights so that #2 better identifies what is or isn't among the relevant terms on which to run regressions.
I think you're probably missing the forest for the trees here... broadly speaking, these multibillion "parameter" (whatever that actually means) models store a lot more than shakespeare, and have storage costs in the 100s of GB/TB (which translates to $$$$$$ in SSD/RAM costs), nevermind the (kilos/mega/giga)watts involved, all the pollution, etc...
Meanwhile, a template (maybe a couple KB) costs less than a couple cents to store and run. Large Languages Models are not really interesting, (smaller) LLMs that only contain "what you need" are.
> Maybe people smarter than me know better but couldn't there be a middle ground where an IDE/Editor has an embedded engine (doesn't need to be a full-on LLM) that doesn't require external tool calls and token spend?
IDEA already have small LLM for one line code completion IIRC.
But the gain people want from LLM is generally "here, add this entire feature" or "here, go thru every dependency's changelog and update code to work with latest version". Those are not small LLM tasks
Great idea! It’d be something like Common Business Oriented Language, or COBOL for short.
I have hope we will get there eventually, once all the hype/wealth extraction/boys club giving all their buddies money cycles end, and the specialized tools with real value start to emerge.
These specialized tools already deliver tremendous value. What happens on the backend financially is of no concern to me, as I have no influence over it.
I think they're in the perfect position to take a stab at actually monetizing a "just-works-and-good-enough" local code-assistant that works well enough to save people on burning tokens with the big providers and/or keeping their data offline for regulatory reasons (ie also selling to customers that CANNOT use Claude or OpenAI).
1: Local models are catching up quickly
2: Visual Studio Intellicode (not to be confused with Intellisense) was/is surprisingly good at suggestions (when it first appeared before people went over to CLI's I felt that it was almost magically good for it's time, turned off co-pilot and whatever backend for a reason of compliance for a local workspace and the suggestions are quite good still even if not on the same level as the frontier suggestions).
If it pans out, with their brand people many would probably be happy to fork over for a Jetbrains licence.
JetBrains Air
> without existential risk
To do nothing is to die. I've been a JetBrains subscriber for over a decade. Nobody is going to use their tools in five years. I certainly don't need my subscription anymore.
> on some "also ran" LLM sinkhole.
They can't do Junie. It's a dead end. They can't do the same thing everyone else is doing either, or they're exactly as you put it: an "also ran" in a very crowded field.
The only way for JetBrains to survive is to figure out their Garmin play. They either find some niche within the existing product or - maybe (and very improbably) - they can innovate something wild nobody else has figured out yet that provides a path to new fertile pasture. But that's more the startup path than the thriving incumbent facing innovator's dilemma path.
But no matter what, if they stay the course, they're dead. Just like half the people expecting to still be writing code by hand.
I think they are trying new things even with "nobody writes code anymore" in mind. Their IDEs are now MCP servers for agents to reason about the code. Imagine your agent will stop wasting tokens using grep to find symbol usages if he can just ask IDE where it is used. They are not the best option for vibecoders right now but who knows what will happen in 1 year.
Integration with other developer tools, code reviews etc. are better than ever. Ideavim is probably the best vim plugin and it gets new features every month. They are also investing a lot in the AI.
I would bet they will survive just fine unless we would write software in slack only using emoji :-)
Imagine your agent will stop wasting tokens using grep to find symbol usages if he can just ask IDE where it is used. They are not the best option for vibecoders right now but who knows what will happen in 1 year.
Can't agents just use a language server? There are already a bunch of projects that provide this, e.g.: https://www.agent-lsp.com/
Doesn't seem like a huge differentiator anymore?
I don't really know much about their current users, but from a business perspective, post-tokenmaxxing and them having an IDE, it seems like the most efficient environment for having a human in the loop is something they could tackle?
Well nobody needs to use IDE. There were always people who used vim with tmux as their IDE. The value of IDE is the I as in integrated - I see some value in having easy to manage single dev environment with batteries included. (I'm not an IDE guy though, and I personally closer to vim/vscode + plugins)
There were always people who used vim with tmux as their IDE.
But until language servers, IDEs with built-in code analysis had a huge advantage. This stopped once LSP was designed and some language servers got mature. LSP was developed originally by VS Code and it is easy to see why - it allowed VS Code to compete with IDEs without writing their own code analysis by letting language developers write a standard server. This made VS Code (and others like Zed) so powerful, that they had already replaced IDEs for many users (maybe outside Java). LLMs are just another nail in the coffin.
Not using tooling (or not creating one) for repeating tasks and trying to one shot everything with latest frontier model is a difference between the bill for AI usage being 10 Eur or 10000 Eur
And their MCP servers and tools are great! But I wish they’d remember that some of us also actually code in the IDE, because human usage quality of their IDEs has been getting worse in that time…
> They either find some niche within the existing product
They should stay in where they started, dev experience and IDEs custom for each language. Entering the AI coding was a mistake in my opinion, I’m sure one can argue that AI coding would have better tooling without their IDEs, but AI coders (Cc and codex) don’t use IDEs anymore so it’s a lost battle before the start
I remember around 2019 or so they shipped their first AI feature and there was a huge backlash for it. Did that change their direction in anyway? Obviously 2026 is a way different landscape than back then.
I disagree on to do nothing is also to die, I'd love to continue paying if they prioritized bugfixing, speed, remote/container editing and having an open AI ecosystem, as well as supporting any new language features without degenerating into an "always online" editor like vs.code.
I could not care less about "new paradigm" editors, UI reworks and AI lock-in offerings, the only AI I want is let me bring my own local model, or interface with claude / codex / ...
I have been Jetbrains subscriber for over a decade and stopped using them last year. Visual Studio Code did LLM integration better. And now I am using VS Code less and less with AI-native control plane like Paseo. I can literally develop on my mobile phone.
I love their tools and am keeping my subscription for now, but would have to agree.
VSCode has been eating at their users for years now. Jetbrains tools still were much better in my opinion but they are competing with “free” and “good enough”. With AI getting better, the main advantages of Jetbrains are gone.
I don’t need a massive IDE anymore. I still need an editor, but there’s hundreds of better tools for quick edits than a massive IDE.
It’s a company at the end of the day, but I hope they find a niche or pull a Garmin play like you said, otherwise I don’t see them being relevant.
> Just like half the people expecting to still be writing code by hand.
I know this is not your main point, but common.
If this is true, AI would be the first tech impossible to learn 5 years after it appeared.
Common? Did you mean come on?
> I certainly don't need my subscription anymore
Sure. I still use mine though; privately and at work.
> Nobody is going to use their tools in five years.
> they're dead. Just like half the people expecting to still be writing code by hand.
Hyperbole much. Leave it on LinkedIn man.
Who knows?
5 years is a long time.
They're trying to navigate the AI era just like everyone else.
You know what we got told at work? “Scrappy AI startups are snapping at our heels, we need to move fast so the competition doesn't over take us”
…but if you ask: what startups? Silence. If you ask, why are we scared of some teenager vibe coding a platform and stealing our customers? Silence.
Dont question the narrative.
Of course AI is an existential threat. Of course there are vibed startups trying to eat our market.
Have you not seen our share price?
Such hyperbolic BS. Ffs. Calm down.
They picked weird direction. "Here, pay ENTIRE EXTRA SUB to use the LLM we made that is worse than one you're already using".
Yeah, no, vast majority just want to pick a AI vendor and integrate it into their IDEA or CLion or whatever other editor they were already using. Pushing into entirely different subscription was dead on arrival.
They figured that out and started integrating it into main tooling (https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/33314-air), but they definitely wasted a bunch of resources on something nobody really wanted.
This was so annoying as a long time subscriber- we were begging them to get / let us integrate some of the more mainstream models - didn’t help that there early model was terrible
> Nobody is going to use their tools in five years.
What will replace it? The dumpster fire called Eclipse, certainly not. The even larger dumpster fire that is Electron based VS Code, also not. And "vibe coding", "agentic AI" etc. will also be a thing of the past once the VC money spigot selling tokens for far below actual cost dries up.
The JetBrains portfolio is here to stay.
(One might even see a total ban for American products in the EU or a significant push in sovereign technology on the horizon, and JB stands to profit from both options!)
I'm not a fan of VS Code myself, but everyone I know uses it (except for people I myself have influenced into using something else). It truly is a sort of default editor these days.
I guess it depends on your niche; I spend half my time coding Golang and Python, and the other half terraform, ansible, perl and I use other languages now and again for small projects and utilities.
In the devops/sysadmin world my stack would be common, and mostly people pick an editor and stick to it. I've been using Emacs for the past 20+ years at this point, and the last time I used Microsoft's IDE was back in the day when I was writing desktop apps using MFC (which probably dates me pretty well!) with visual studio.
I've seen colleagues use anything from atom, vim, emacs, notepad++, and other generic editors whos name I didn't recognize. There are one or two instances of VS Code I see now and again, but they're the outlier rather than the norm in my professional life.
How much? Are they burning tokens to heat the offices?
I've always been a JB fan. But the last few updates have been quite rough, and they really don't seem to have worked out the AI thing at all.
> … they really don't seem to have worked out the AI thing at all.
Who has?
I hope they are not investing in tokens. I say this as ex-JetBrainer. I want JetBrains to succeed but what it would in the IDE landscape?
Cost of services is up. I suspect that's where the token cost comes into play, but they didn't "invest" in tokens. They can't call that an investment anyway. The increase in cost of services relative to revenue impacts net income - we can see that in prior years - but that's not the whole story. Total assets on the balance sheet increased at the same time net income decreased. They spent money on something of value.
Why couldn’t they capitalize token spend?
Could they label that as investing in such a report? Sounds misleading. Investing to me means paying for something you then own afterwards, paying for AI sounds like a normal expense.
Just a semi-educated guess....they plowed a bunch of cash into an "AI native" IDE product after getting spooked by Cursor.
Most of their products have an AI harness embedded and it works well, at least for me. Has tools to let the models access proper debugging too(my experience is Clion) so that my build is available to them even when using remote/docker builds. The integration with codex works well too.
They host a lot of models too, and that is probably where they burned the cash.
https://junie.jetbrains.com/ probably.
No idea why they thought they can compete with frontier AI labs on that, it's entirely waste of money
They also tried to push AI feature set as a separate subscription which is just insane in current tooling market.
All users wanted is good integration of multi-AI providers in their base offering. I think they are slowly shifting to that but that's a lot of money wasted already
> ...the real big hint is "Cash Flow From Investing" plunging from -83 million $USD to -469. That's massive. They're staffing up and investing in... something.
...or they're bailing out of really bad investments before they become even worse ones...
Jetbrains has been pushing Junie real hard, my guess is that they've been giving out too many cheap tokens to try to stay relevant as Claude and friends pull people away from the IDE.
In everyone's day jobs where they used an IDE 5 years ago, or even a year ago, are those jobs abandoning the IDE?
I still use Visual Studio in my day job, where Claude's output while VERY helpful, requires my ownership of everything, meaning I am inspecting every single line it changes. If a change is bigger than I think it should, I kill it before I commit.
I know I don't HAVE to use an IDE for that, but if the change is small enough, I am faster than asking Claude to understand the subtext behind my personal context of the product, and the IDE is supremely helpful for making a quick change across a handful of files.
I'm beginning to abandon the IDE (vscode in my case). I've always been very comfortable with (or at least not scared of) the command line so the Claude app with a terminal pane open is handling much of my IDE use cases. What I really need to do is get better at using find, grep, and other search tools from the terminal and then create a good .vimrc for editing and i'm set. heh what's old is new again!
> I am inspecting every single line it changes.
Honestly, when I'm looking at ClaudeCode's output 75% of time i'm doing it to learn and understand and not just check for correctness. I'm confident enough to admit I don't know everything and I've learned a lot from reading Claude's code.
> meaning I am inspecting every single line it changes.
I think this is changing fast. Pressure is increasing on devs for output, and most devs I know are no longer inspecting lines. I have devs in my business unit who claim to not have looked at code for months, except on certain rare occasions. I am not a developer and this week I've been given access to the repo to build my own apps and extensions. There's a "review" between commit and deploy, but there's no chance the Tech Lead can manually review everything, so that's getting done by AI too.
I know this horrifies a lot of devs, but these tools are shockingly good and we are not seeing an increase in bugs. In fact our automated detections (also AI assisted) are reducing the number of customer reported critical bugs.
I really think the days of inspecting every line are over.
This type of codebases will become a goldmine for cybersec in the near future. Except by then, only few people will be able to detect them or fix them. LLMs will leave the hardest problems and most difficult bugs plus and plethora of devs who either have skill atrophy or haven't learn these things in the first place.
It's an interesting philosophic question. LLMs tend to be overly verbose and defensive in coding. It's not a ton of extra complexity but it makes the code harder to follow for a human. But if a human is not writing the code how much does that matter?
I agree that they have gotten shockingly good. It's been a long time since I've seen them do something that is objectively wrong. Once we get closer to the "too cheap to meter" cost level things will change radically again.
Have you ever tried to use an LLM to add a feature to a really nice, pre 2023 codebase? It’s incredible how much easier it is to do, how much of a difference you instantly feel
IMO what's being called an 'Agent Development Environment' solves this issue for you. I like Orca but there's a few dozen of them.
Basically they give you a way to view the code the llm has generated/changed easily, annotate that code for the llm, and manage multiple agents and at once.
I had personal subscriptions to WebStorm and GoLand and cancelled them not long after getting Windsurf. Just don't need the IDE abilities like I used to... Still use 'go to definition' but that's pretty much it.
Can't seem to beat vscode in over-ssh editing. Using IDEA it requires ~2GB transfer (local download plus ssh transfer) which is quite significant.
> ...inspecting...
I got used to sublime merge to context-switch editing vs reviewing, staging changes line-by-line
Junie's features are geared very much towards the more vibecoding side of things. Jetbrains even produced a vibecodin IDE.
I can go for a week or two without opening my IDE. Unheard of just a year ago.
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.
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.
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).
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".
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.
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?”
Apparently, no one commenting knows how to read financial statements. They look at one item and assume the company is going out of business. Meanwhile, their total assets have increased. Cost of services have increased significantly over recent years - mostly commensurate with revenue growth, although the gap has been shrinking. Operating costs have been pretty flat. I don't have time to investigate where they spent the money, but the company is not at risk. They brought in more money than in prior years and spent it on something. That's it.
Isn’t it the Junie AI tool? I hope not, but that seems like the most likely possibility.
If that 'costs' is 'tokens' well it might not possibly bode well as this would not be primaryly R&D
> They've invested in something big
Wonder what the "something big" could be that companies are throwing money into in 2026.
Many organisms in an adversarial environment spend significant energy in their dying hours trying to survive
Or more likely, they're burning cash trying to chase the AI train to no avail while their core product stagnates, which is definitely not a good thing.
Well, clinging on something that might be dying off also doesn't sound like a sound business strategy.
If AI continues to be improving then it's reasonable to assume most people won't need a full blown IDE.
Oh, they don't need a reason to let the core product stagnate. They've been doing that for years.
The war in Ukraine and subsequent move to Czechia did seem to hurt them pretty badly, but I wouldn't say they are stagnant. I've been a happy customer of PHPStorm for years and it continues to improve.
Move to Germany.
The company has always been registered in Prague, Czechia.
They just moved the development center from St. Peterburg, Russia to Munich, Germany.
I only use their DataGrip product. Compared to the competition they are iterating at lightspeed.
Tbf their core product is at risk by everyone and their mom having an "AI IDE" product.
If your existing, well-established product is at risk due to new, competing products that do things in radically different ways, immediately dropping your product to chase the competition from way behind is usually not the right move. Unless you have a significant moat around your ecosystem, what reason do users have to adopt your inferior copy instead of the thing you copied?
I firmly believe JetBrains would have a better chance of survival if they stopped chasing the AI hype and got back to work on their IDEs, accepting the fact that they'll have less users than before. Right now, they're completely lost.
There won't be anyone left to pay for the core product.
Coding by hand is for dinosaurs.
JetBrains needs to figure out the AI workflow that developers will be using over the next decade. Assuming that's going to be a big enough market, of course. A bigger market might be to build for agents and completely autonomous use cases.
IDEs are for professionals. I understand that LLMs can one shot a weather app, and I get that it's exciting, but this is not the case with complex software.
I agree with you in principle but I am seeing my colleague who supposedly is an experienced engineer just sends out 40-file PRs without going through the code. When someone asked why the code does a certain thing he used LLM to come up with an answer. Apparently he has no idea what the code is doing and I doubt he reviews any of it or cares.
Yes, welcome to the new world. This is how things are now. Every couple months the models and tools get better, while everyone keeps assuring themselves that any day now they’re going to run into the wall. Whether we like it or not, this is how it is. Let go and let Claude.
I don't understand what the value proposition of such an employee is. If all you're doing is acting as a meat proxy between your manager and your AI, why does your role even exist? Why shouldn't your superiors just prompt the AI directly?
I agree. Even in the era of LLMs, part of one’s job as a software developer is to understand the codebase and how it works and be able to fix bugs and add features without breaking other things in the process or compromising quality or security.
If you’re not doing that and just blindly committing whatever code the LLM generates without so much as glancing at it, you’re not adding any value and there’s a good chance that with a little initial guidance, the janitor could perform your prompt-jockeying about as well.
The management cares more about "this dude ships things" than "this dude ships things that are maintainable".
Whether someone else will be left cleaning up the mess (I have been in that position) is a separate question.
What is the value proposition of the managers? In the old times, it was mostly managing the human aspects of development. At least in my experience, managers wouldn't know what to prompt, even if they could.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcIMIyQnOso
I couldnt not put this here. I have people skills.
This yours?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958850
RustRover used to be my daily driver.
Now it's Claude Code and ever so occasionally Codex.
I never do work in IDEs by hand anymore. I stopped writing code entirely in February and I will likely never write code again unless my internet dies.
I need a JetBrains-level AST navigator that focuses on high level code navigation and understanding, and moreover on code and architectural review. I need to quickly scan diffs and quickly see architecture at a glance.
Of course even that too many eventually fall away.
I rarely open RustRover these days. I could never have predicted that.
I use https://github.com/DetachHead/rebased, which is based on IntelliJ, for review. The maintainer is responsive.
Not sure who downvoted this. JetBrains IDEs are done for.
I don't even remember the last time I opened them, I cancelled my All Products pack this year.
The advantage it had over vscode was always the better language features and the familiar UI.
None of that is useful to me in AI based workflows. Some might still disagree, but the manual development workflow using an IDE is clearly dying.
JetBrain's revenue will obviously crater as a result, particularly when slower enterprise licenses follow.
Why do you think their revenue is up?
I "code" using Codex but I still use PHPStorm for checking diffs, database access, reviewing PRs, and the debugger. The value proposition has changed, not disappeared.
I always preferred to check MR diffs in GitLab.
And I don't use the debugger nowadays. The AI can do it much faster and add relevant instrumentation and parse logs.
I've been paying for the all products pack for 8 years now, but at my latest job all code is generated, and I think this will be the reality at most companies. I won't extend this year
> Not sure who downvoted this.
If you've been on HN long enough you recognize that the OP is quite prolific in making absurd claims about AI: infamously predicted that children would be making professional, Hollywood level films by the end of 2025, and is now spending their time building the 5000th barely functional clone of Adobe tools[0]. It's probably a little unfair, but they are bold claims from someone who really does not have the ground to be making bold claims.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958850
This is like watching weekend car tinkerers argue with Ferrari mechanics about their tooling. "I'm never going to write code ever again."
Only that it isn't, and that millions of professionals, including myself, use agentic AI successfully to implement high quality software.
That there is no lack of people delivering low quality using AI does not change this.
> millions of professionals, including myself,
> there is no lack of people delivering low quality using AI
I like how you self-associate. Do you really belong to the first group, or is that what you think you are.
there is also quite enough fields in which AI generated code is just not even allowed to touch the codebase to begin with.
There surely is code so critical that not fully understanding every line of it is not an option.
That's probably the rare exception.
Even in finance everyone is using AI.
You don't get the nuance that there are people who enjoy the writing the code part more than they enjoy the handholding and hitting enter on a prompt part. And they write it fast or concise enough to not need to prompt engineer bicker with a machine.
And as soon as an edge case pops up that your model will have never been able to hear about because it hasn't been released publicly, security vuln, whatever, you'll get a "fix" confidently hallucinated at you and be none the wiser.
There's going to be a huge pendulum swing with all the llm zombies and sanewashing it like this isn't helping anyone.
All of this just oozes junior engineer if you're even employed in the field at all.
I do get that some people enjoy the manual process more than they enjoy building the product.
It doesn't give you the right to insult my expertise, and frankly your arguments sound like things that one would make up despite little actual experience using AI to develop software.
How can one insult something one knows nothing about. Tell us what sort of expert are you instead of patting yourself on the back. Anybody can come here and claim they're bigger experts than you. Will you believe them? Maybe you're a big ego with rubbish "engineering" skills.
Hobbyists are more likely to use IDEs at this point; pros have to get work done.
please tell me what you work on so I can pre-emptively ban it
> Not sure who downvoted this.
Half of HN hates AI.
A large percentage thinks that the current status quo is how things will look over the next decade. They don't think everything is fundamentally and irreversibly changing.
Nobody is coming out of this with the same career. The whole world is being rewired. Some people really don't like that.
I'm just glad we're out of the web platform / cellphone incrementalism era. I wish more of my career could have been spent with this rocket fuel. It's dangerous and hypergolic, but it's fun and flashy and capable of pulling us out of this gravity well.
I use AI on a daily basis and I still found all of your takes in this thread to be silly hyperbole.
It's kinda cute that you think you're the prophet of AI spreading wisdom
probably ai related
A bit tongue-in-cheek but I'm amazed by people that don't open an IDE or look at code. Are you paid to press enter at anything that Claude present to you?
Personally I usually use Claude inside the Jetbrain's IDE terminal, even if I code by hand obviously less. I still like using the diff, navigation, quick access to any file path for my prompt etc but maybe that won't last.
(edit: although I currently use an old perpetual fallback license because I didn't like the last price increase especially as they slowly remove what I like in the UI)
You will be surprised by how many professional software engineers don't read their code or care these days.
I have seen a bubble sort function in a PR from an engineer with 10 years of experience. Meanwhile sort from standard library is easily available with one single line.
The bar has become as low as "it works" without considering what's in the code or whether the entire feature should even exist at all.
P.S. that same engineer sent out a PR of 200-file feature. The PR is so large that it freezes the latest MacBook Pro if you try to read it. Nobody reviewed it and he merged it himself. Nobody uses that feature, and nobody in the teams wants to maintain it. Now we are considering scrapping it.
It’s so easy to generate a pile of crap now that it “just works” as you say.
Quality, maintainability, simplicity, understandability, flexibility etc all still matter at $DAY_JOB, where you’ve got paying customers. We’ve got a responsibility to write good software that adds to people’s lives.
I’d recommend to try to raise the bar. Commit messages written by humans, no PRs above a certain size, any PR needs an introduction / explanation by author first for the reviewers.
Most engineers aren’t really idiots.
When you get paid to care, you will care. Unfortunately, no one cares, they just want results, any result. Bubble sort will do, especially for low volume tasks.
Use the time you save by not caring, to do other fun stuff.
The thing is: people quickly discover that even mediocre LLM-code with a mediocre LLM-review, is still better quality than what they hand wrote and hand-reviewed.
So it's already an improvement. Should it be manually read, comprehended, reviewed? Probably. But they can get to an improvement over what they did 2 years ago, with basically no effort. And then they can get a little bit further, with massive effort?
The "LLM-yolo" is a big knee in the cost/benefit curve. It's an improvement over their "old code". The only drawback is: it's still containing bugs, and now no one understands them. But that's not hitting them until that code has aged somewhat, so a year or two down the line.
> The thing is: people quickly discover that even mediocre LLM-code with a mediocre LLM-review, is still better quality than what they hand wrote and hand-reviewed.
If mediocre code is better quality than what you wrote by hand, you've quickly discovered that you're incompetent.
> If mediocre code is better quality than what you wrote by hand
Most code I have seen and reviewed over my 25+ year programmer life has been no worse than mediocre LLM code.
It's not a massive sample, but to me it suggests, most code programmers write, is somewhere between bad and mediocre.
And here's the appeal of the models: if what you used to produced was bad-to-mediocre, and you can now do slightly better for much cheaper, that's a huge win.
> And here's the appeal of the models: if what you used to produced was bad-to-mediocre, and you can now do slightly better for much cheaper, that's a huge win.
And the guy you were responding to is seeing people produce worse code with LLMs (e.g. senior engineers pushing non-library bubble sort implementations, like they're in a high school programming class).
And if you're somehow right, it's not a "huge win" for you. It's a sign you're personally providing little value to the business, and sooner or later you'll need to find a new career.
I just look at my own diffs in a draft GHE PR and iterate with my agent on Github. This is often a much better UX than trying to make sure every single linter or thing is consistent between my machine and the CI machine. We do use Docker but it's still just easier to do it all on the CI box / Github.
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.
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.
>Are you paid to press enter at anything that Claude present to you?
I'm paid to create a product. If Claude does so without me having to look at the code, then that's what I'm being paid to do.
You could be implicitly paid to understand what you're delivering and reading code could be a way to achieve that.
I think you're paid to deliver. Lots of developers for decades have delivered crap that looks good on the surface and is otherwise unmaintainable. Now we're reaching the point where "everyone can code" and review queues are getting too long, with the result of many PRs being yoloed.
This of course varies by company but this is clearly where it's headed: bot pushes, bot reviews, you look at the PR title and click merge.
But then it's really Claude that is creating the product. What is your part?
To fix it later :)
I keep lazygit open next to each Claude/Codex session that's working on a change, but over time scrolling the changes has gone from necessary to just out of curiosity.
At this point of 2026, if you're reading code and still catching things, then the problem was before the code was written. You should have decided more high level preferences like invariants before the work began.
And this is a good thing.
I am mostly happy with Neovim with an LSP integration. I'm not going to say it's "lighter" or anything because rust-analyzer isn't exactly "small", but it is a simpler, and IMO "cleaner" interface. Also completely free.
I do look at the code and have to correct Claude most of the time, but I've noticed that with AI-assisted coding, I mostly look at the diffs when i'm inside IntelliJ. I don't need a pricey full-fledged IDE to just look at files and their diffs.
Personally I don't use CLI anymore, Codex app is very good and it starts to look like how IDEs will be in the future. You can review code in a GitHub style diff and leave inline comments (super useful), have multiple agents work in parallel with or without worktrees, plus there is very good code navigation (especially if you ask followup clarification questions that will link to other parts of code).
Related, it amazes me how many seasoned developers don't know how to do basic tasks in their editor/IDE with the keyboard and instead rely on their mouse. Most people don't need to be super users, but it baffles me when I see a developer who hasn't at least learned the keyboard shortcuts for opening files and jumping to functions/methods, etc.
I’m only a mild keyboard user in IDEs, but I think I’d go mad if the keyboard shortcuts for quick open, jump to line, jump to function, etc suddenly disappeared.
I’m sure there are people who aren’t looking at the code at all. But for those that are I guess I’m wondering why bother with an IDE anymore? I’m finding I can just review everything I need to with a text editor like Neovim now. Even GitHub review is probably good enough for people.
What do you expect when management pressures engineers to tokenmaxx? This is a product of their doing.
JetBrains still has best tooling for previewing changes, resolving conflicts, git integration. I get that vibe coders not necessarily need all that but it's the best class tooling money can buy.
> Are you paid to press enter at anything that Claude present to you?
I mean, sometimes work falls exactly at the tool's strongest suit/match.
I am trying to think of what a comparison here could be but, for example, I remember early days in my career where pretty much 80% of the work was writing boilerplate and using scaffolding/generator tools, plugging them in the various plumbing and pipes of the stack, and just ticking boxes through Jira
Lots of "CRUD" and/or similar "recipe" type of work that was really just turning your brain off and needed that grunt labour force
You may ask: why is the person even needed?
My answer is the same as before: I don't know, I didn't know why were they needed back them either, felt like all could be automated as well, maybe the cost to invest in automating and mapping that all out was never a priority and the ROI math was "good enough" for the business while leadership had other north stars they were worried about?
Using a CLI coding agent in your IDE's terminal is a terrible way to view conversation history and works poorly for organizing multiple conversations.
It only fits a hands-on, merely AI-assisted development approach, on one feature at a time, that is not typically productive compared to agentic development.
You might disagree, but you'll find that the proponents of the hands-on approach are losing ground every month as AI gets better at working autonomously.
I'm expecting IDEs to adapt to new workflows, albeit very slowly.
There is potential to build a better UI than what's constrained within a CLI's grid of characters.
I'll admit I'm currently not up to speed on having multiple features worked at the same time, with git worktrees etc.
Except surrendering cognitive control over the system being built makes things worse.
Claude constantly makes poor architectural decisions, adds unnecessary and costly checks, makes wrong assumptions, etc.
Doesn't take the value out of LLMs writing code, but they need to be properly steered and reasoned with. How will you do so if you don't even browse the code it generates.
I always suspect that the people all in fully agentic codig like this are mostly creating prototypes, half-assed copies of existing products, etc.
I am glad to not work in such an environment.
You'd be wrong, I'm working on a paid mobile app, with the express goal of delivering a better product than existing competitors.
I've put like 500 hours of work into it over the last 6 months, besides my full-time software engineering job.
Frankly I think I have more experience than most here at using AI.
For me it works very well to just have a conversation with the agent in order to understand issues and steer it.
Essentially I would ask the question I would otherwise try to answer by reading the code.
Obviously, this has the downside that sometimes you miss things that would be obvious when reading and understanding all the code.
Since that can take a lot of time, it is still more efficient for me to instead QA test functionality and address issues I notice during actual use.
you think these guys press enter?
I'm slowly accepting that this is the new reality.
I've spent 1 month between august and early september writing some of the best code of my life. LLMs only provided feedback, I wrote all the code manually, still remember it by heart.
I was very delighted by the many architectural iterations that led to it. 9 files, around 10k lines of code (of those, 7k tests).
By the end of super funny exercise I kinda realized that if I had the same feature vibe coded it would've been better. I would've done much more and progressed more feature wise.
I just feel stupid hand writing my code.
It doesn't help that I work with stellar individual contributors. All of my team mates (except a junior) are either all former faang or contributed to projects we all use (from the TypeScript compiler to Linux). And they are all abandoning if not spearheading the abandonment of reading code. I'm talking people that truly loved the technical aspect of it and excelled in it.
I just feel stupid, like I'm carrying a weight that I should abandon.
Comments like yours feel would've made sense 6 months ago, but now are crumbling.
Software is essentially so cheap and throwaway nowadays that letting LLMs write it is imperative. When you find your use cases you start reviewing it or rewriting it thoroughly.
There’s a middle ground.
I’ve been using agents to do the code for me, but I explicitly tells it to iterate in small changes that I can review and approve as it happens, not after a 2k lines diff. It makes me understand what’s being made, and test every little change before we move on to change other parts of the code. Also helps you correct any misunderstanding right from the start.
When you give a ticket to a jr developer, do you look over their shoulder the entire time they write the code? Or do pause to answer questions, give feedback on how to go about a task, and review their results?
If you need to review every edit that claude wants to make what's the point in using it? We're now treating it basically like a junior dev. Do our best to make sure that it's on the right path (leaning hard on the superpowers plugin) then let it work and look at the result. Though even that review is heavily AI assisted now. Our leadership has mandated that everything that can be done by AI, should be done by AI. We've only been in that mode for a couple of months but I'm starting to think that it's plausible with proper human steering and oversight.
This must be why every Google app now freezes for 3 or 4 seconds on iOS when you launch them.
> Are you paid to press enter at anything that Claude present to you?
And seen that JetBrains revenues still grew 6% YOY, it looks like after all there are still developers paying for an IDE.
I thought that by now, according to the AI kool-aid drinkers, there wouldn't be any developer anymore?
I'm paid to produce software that has features and works.
Nobody cares how I get there or how ugly the code is. They care how fast I can do it and how reliable the software is.
I look at code sometimes, in down time, to see what's been done terribly by AI, and to fix it and hopefully fix the process so that things don't get done terribly in that particular way in the future.
It's not about "how ugly the code is". Poor solutions heaped on top of poor solutions can result in a system with real users and intractable issues. I'm all for AI, but not reviewing the code seems likely to cause issues long term.
Well, I used to pay more attention to the code, and then I found that if I spent more tokens having the AI review its work than actually creating new features, I was able to get more, better work done.
The AI review stage is where I've found prompting matters a lot more than that initial prototyping phase. I've iterated on prompts and tooling that help the AI keep the codebase clean-ish.
> Well, I used to pay more attention to the code, and then I found that if I spent more tokens having the AI review its work than actually creating new features, I was able to get more, better work done.
Of course it did. Because reviewing code thoroughly is harder than writing it.
Writing only consists of "making sure it does the task", reviewer have to understand code first, check if it does the task, then check whether it doesn't affect something else negatively (and it can be meta things like "doesn't adhere to project style", even if technical side is correct)
Whats your YOE, like when did you enter tech as a SWE?
This shouldn't be normalized for you yet unless you're at a faang pushing this at the edge and new to the field, cause this isn't what we used to do 2 years ago.
If you're happy with the ai slop $$$ job more power to you but that isn't the entire field and there used to be (and hopefully still are) good and fun engineering jobs.
Contrary to popular normie belief, no not everyone wants to work at the Metas and OpenAIs and for good reason.
edit: Guys a literal business owner writing code for his own business, christ, what a waste of my time. So instead of hiring actual engineers you try to make it sound like you're employed as a software engineer and your experience is remotely normal. You are the literal business owner not filling seats because you're using AI.
"I'm paid to just shut up and code, baby!"
Yeah, that isn't a real SWE job, bud, don't make comments like you're in the trenches.
YOE is ~30, from my first PHP app to present. I've spent somewhere between 5 and 80 hours a week coding for the past 30 years, mostly self-employed, writing tools and creating custom CNC machines/robots for my own business, but more recently doing same thing for a company as a full time employee.
I still get to do some coding, where there are safety-critical production systems, but the work is mostly tooling that gets us to that point or supports the business otherwise.
It's an awesome job. Couldn't be funner, pretty much, except on data collection days. I get high level tasks, or come up with my own, and find or build solutions - no more running a whole business, doing production, keeping books, shipping orders, doing customer support - I only do the stuff I like.
Wow, this really sucks. With all the money flocking to companies that trained LLMs on stolen data, we may lose the only set of IDEs that offer high quality professional development tools
I'm surprised that the word "only" still applies. I have my laments about JB (PyCharm / RR): Mainly centered around performance. Yet it has no competition! Whenever I read about VsCode, or Zed as alternatives, I feel disbelief, as they're not in the same league.
Zed in particular, from the way it was described upon release, sounded like it should have been a JB competitor. Reality: It can't even move functions or structs!
I think you are going to get a lot of pushback from people using e.g. typescript, for which VS Code is pretty good.
For languages like kotlin, java and even python JB is still way ahead of the competition.
Pretty good is pretty bad for a tool I use most of my day.
Considering that Kotlin is their own invention and that it exists mainly to schmooze people onto their platform I sure hope they're ahead with it!
I love JetBrains. For many years I was a happy subscriber to the All Products Pack, paid for out of my own pocket. I would have said that you'd have to pry my JetBrains from my cold, dead hands.
A year or two ago, I finally gave up:
1. The IDE was simply too slow - notably slower and "heavier" than VS Code in particular - and it seemed to regularly get slower.
2. Bugs - from the complex (TypeScript constructs that tsc itself handles just fine while WebStorm's code analysis kept throwing false positives on) to the trivial and silly (failing to properly handle the <col> tag in React), and often staying open for years.
Meanwhile, VS Code just kept getting better, addressing the complaints I had with it while staying fast.
I work almost exclusively in TypeScript these days; as other commenters pointed out, I'm sure that JetBrains products are still great for other languages.
And their refactoring tools remain second to none. I'm profoundly disappointed in our industry that the VS Code developers apparently looked at JetBrains, with its arsenal of expertly crafted, deterministic, testable refactorings, and said, "Nope, we'd rather make everyone use inherently random language models for anything more complex than Rename Symbol."
How is vscode not in the same league? JB feels way too bloated and slow and doesn't add anything significant over other offerings
It's not even close. vscode can approximate JB IDEs but that takes pulling in plugins on your own, managing their configuration, and adapting when the setup inevitably breaks. JB IDEs bake in everything you can get via vscode plugins with documentation, a cohesive experience, and regular maintenance to keep them working for you. Concrete examples that are better in JB land for me: git conflict resolution, refactoring (in numerous ways), jumping to definitions, finding usages (especially on Python projects).
> It's not even close.
That's always been my experience. Not even close. One gives you legos that lets you make a plastic toy, and the other is an industrial machine shop for code.
I thought maybe I was holding VSCode wrong, though.
> I thought maybe I was holding VSCode wrong, though.
Likewise (Same with zed). I've given them a thorough try several times, assuming I was holding it wrong as you say based on conversations with others who use them effectively. I've reached the conclusion you say here each time.
Code intelligence (find usages, go to definition, refactor/rename/move, etc.) and debugging are on another level - more powerful, more reliable, with more edge-cases covered.
At least, that was so in dynamic languages, like Python, and PHP, last I checked.
For dotnet, Rider runs rings around VSCode. Even using the Resharper plugin, VSCode is nowhere near the same functionality. I even use Rider above Visual Studio because it works way better for mobile and cross platform. VSCode runs okay on the same hardware as Rider, but it is all too manual to configure. VS2026 is a horrible bloated pig that constantly grinds to a halt on the same hardware.
When have you tried VS last? Since they went multi core, it’s usually very fast and it’s mostly R# slowing it down (though I read that improved, dunno).
I use Rider but need VS for some things.
Maybe there exist better ways, but I'd say every coworker I've seen in a VScode variant uses freetext search to find everything.
What about debugging and stepping into a DLL (decompiling it)? Out of the box DotPeek vs whatever vscode plugin you can set up.
But there's plenty of examples.
What do you mean, we still have neovim
Just feels like they've been making all the wrong decisions. Quality has been really lackluster, and their attempts to hop onto the AI train have been as annoying as they have been bad. CoPilot sucked. Their own AI coding models suck.
The redesign they've gone for also seems like a supremely weird choice. It's like they're trying to be more like VS Code, when their probably biggest selling point was that unlike VS Code, they offered a full and traditional IDE experience.
Their trajectory has been a deeply questionable mix of change for the sake of change and nervously doing what everyone else is doing.
Visual Studio, RAD Studio, Eclipse, Netbeans, XCode, QtCreator, KDevelop are still around and good enough for most workflows.
There are even areas in which some of those best IntelliJ IDEs.
One such thing that Xcode has that IntelliJ doesn’t is per-pane history. In Xcode hitting back/forward navigates history for your focused editor pane whereas IntelliJ’s navigates history across all editor panes.
This might sound like a minor difference, but Xcode’s way gets me to where I want to go more quickly most of the time because I’m not having to wade through the likely-irrelevant history of the other panes. It’s a frequent frustration whenever I have to use an IntelliJ IDE.
Their revenue is still going up so I don't think that's it.
Only?
Microsoft's stuff is quite good, or you've got a really high bar.
Mostly constrained to a single ecosystem and dev/deployment platform - a platform that has never been particularly great for development and has been made vastly less so in the recent years.
> Microsoft
> quite good
Good one.
Happy to hate on MS as much as the next guy but VSCode is pretty much the Chrome of the IDE world at this point, that might be what parent was alluding to (since I'd struggle to defend any other Microsoft software).
VSCode is not an IDE. It's a text editor with some optional bells and whistles. I presume the GP refers to the actual Visual Studio.
Visual Studio is less shit than ever, but only after JetBrains gave MS a firm kick up the ass with Rider.
It's got an editor, a debugger, code intelligence, a debugger, terminal, task running, test explorer, refactoring tools, project management, and so on. What's an IDE if not a text editor with bells and whistles?
It's really not an option in Javaland.
It's almost as if a company can have good and bad products...
Microsoft has had a very long reputation (for good reason) for having good developer tooling, even if Windows was not particularly developer friendly...
Their revenue is up, why is them investing more a bad thing?
It's purely management fault, it happened around 2022-2023. They had all the chances to become a great agentic IDE/harness at some point, if they would start in time, support plugin developers, allocate a proper team instead of 2 people and some semi-random internships. A lot of users were questioning this publicly and privately with them, we all knew how it will end this way. JetBrains lost, no one wants their Junie in 2026 (and didn't want in 2024-2025, whatever was the name of the integration at that time, it was awful). I was on Ultimate Plan since 2012, appx. I quit entirely in 2024. They asked to answer a few surveys over the last few years - even the questions there were far from reality. RIP, JetBrains, it's mostly unrecoverable at this point.
Their management decisions are strange, right. They had a nice tool called Upsource, we used it for code reviews. Then they sunset it and told us to use JetBrains Space instead. After we migrated to JetBrains Space, they said, oh wait, we sunset it too. So we had to migrate to GitLab. And now, with AI-assisted coding, I don't even need their IDE anymore, because I mostly look at diffs. And that kinda brings us back to Upsource. That thing could have been grown to support AI-assisted development, like, get rid of all the heavy IDE stuff, and just have a place for code reviewing agents' output and merging things. Somewhat like GitLab Lite but fully agentic-oriented. I think it would have covered 99% of our use cases.
I heard rumors JetBrains started going downhill around 2022-2023 because they severed ties with employees in Russia's St. Petersburg, which housed their R&D and all (although many employees were relocated but who knows).
What IDEs and harnesses do you use now? I assume you would have had a lot of your classic coding workflows dependant on the jetbrains suite
CC + my own custom tools, I don't see any reason to pay for devtools in 2026 (same as trying to monetize them, or even just share/distribute). My first custom solution was built on top of JB's core in early 2024, btw, but not any more. JetBrains "suite" doesn't really lock you in, it's more like "aura" of the product itself that made me attached for almost 13 years (I never was able to switch, I still think VS Code is so ugly and counter-intuitive in comparison with JB).
I have zero clue what you are talking about and I use Jetbrains products every day. PHPStorm is still the default IDE for many developers.
I still haven’t found an IDE that I feel really helps me develop with AI better than the command line. I have built bespoke tools that work the way I want. But a really good integrated solution would blow my current workflow out of the water. No one seems to have built an IDE with deep support for worktrees, parallel session, walking me thru diffs, and optionally handing control back to me to write the occasional hand-written code myself. Plus most of my work is done on mobile, so Jetbrains has an amazing opportunity…but they seem to be chasing the competition instead of focusing on their moat.
Right now there's a huge friction with IDEs, that if I have it open while claude is working on something, then any caches it has get stale very quickly, and it churns processing trying to keep up with edits.
Any leverage that claude could benefit from LSPs or language/AST MCPs is undone by that tooling not being able to keep up or stay fresh, so the IDE just "runs hot" for no purpose.
Which means I'm incentivised to close my IDE while claude is working, and now I've got used to not looking at the code.
Like you, I really want a system that works better. I want claude to search and edit through better tooling, it would be faster, more accurate, and should in theory be able to leverage compilers to apply edits better and more accurately.
I don't want claude wasting an awful lot of time grepping for things that a compiler cache can answer, but if that compiler cache can't keep up then it's actively harmful.
I'm sure there must be a better way, there must be a way to have smarter more change-aware cache invalidation, and smarter more cache-aware claude tool use, but so far none has happened.
Long term I'm sure the pairing will emerge, but unfortunately I don't think that's going to come from the IDE vendor side, it'll have to come out of some harness research lab, where Anthropic or a competitor finds a way to reliably leverage this stuff for a speed and accuracy boost.
It's completely bonkers to me that an LLM can almost "natively" read profiler output, but doing so involves vast amounts of text and context ingestion, when there are real tools sitting there that it ignores in preference for either reading vast amounts or iffy python one-shot scripts to parse stuff.
I think this is what JetBrains Air is supposed to be. I haven't had a chance to test it but it seems promising.
https://www.jetbrains.com/air/
It still suffers the same problems as Junie, which is that their harness is far too bloated.
Maybe something like delta? This is still pretty new from the folks that make Zed, but looks promising and would address some of the things you mention https://delta.dev/
Same. I feel like JetBrains has an advantage here, so I'm hoping they're working on something compelling. The traditional IDE setup is quickly dying.
I'm usually working between VSCode and Codex/Claude Code at the same time, but find myself mostly in latter these days.
Sublime was/is still the best, unfortunately had to finally abandon it due to lack of first-class agent support. Hard to find something that emphasizes core text editing first and that doesn't constantly have some new update to apply on start that may break or change something.
Have you tried Sublime Merge? Looks like a good git flow editor.
https://www.sublimemerge.com/
Using Claude to write and sublime to review isn't a bad combo.
It feels like JB is trying that, but it hasn't materialized in a way I understand yet; they have a handful of AI tools, and I don't fully understand them at this point, nor how they integrate and what roles they fill. (June, Air, AI asssistant, AI autocomplete)
> most of my work is done on mobile
Can anything serious/complex be done on mobile? I'm genuinely curious. It's seems bizzare in the context of IDE and tooling discussion.
I'm not sure what the problem is after rereading their post? All you need to support everything they said is a remote connection to a heirarchy of worktree-supporting sessions per project, with each having a proper scrolling feed of agent actions taken and your input box.
How do you even review a diff on a phone screen comfortably and effectively?
Cursor has support for work trees, parallel chats, will walk you through diffs line by line. This is what I primarily use for the walking through diffs feature. If I need something to just throw over the wall, I fire up claude.
IMO there’s a ton of room for innovation in the IDE space.
It looks like software dev is going the way of natural language as the final spec that humans see. Regardless of whether this is a good idea or not, it’s happening. My boss asked us not to write any code manually starting in Jan, and now has hinted that we should stop reviewing code too.
Natural language as spec obviously has a ton of limitations. And here an opinionated IDE that can define this sort of workflow better is primed to gain a lot of market share, devs clearly aren’t fussed about switching between IDEs right now.
I should be able to, for example, click on a plantuml diagram and see what the endpoint definitions are, See where the request schemas are.
If I have Agents.md files scattered across my codebase I would like my IDE to help me manage them
I don't think this is related to AI. Pre-AI I thought for many years that they have spread themselves too wide and thin. A new IDE pretty much every six months. Unsustainable whilst ignoring their existing customers and products. I think it's inevitable that they've ended up here.
I think they've started to realise that and are trying to reign it in with 'Fleet' and 'Code With Me' deprecations.
This tracks with what I've observed, as a fan-and-sometimes-user. They look to be funding a skunk works - which started with their version of Cursor (Jules or something), which wasn't great.
They are working on a cli agent; I tried it, but it silently injected hooks into all my other cli agents to re-target JB inference APIs, which caused me to burn through my JB tokens in like two minutes and b0rked all my running agent sessions.
They are working on a spec-driven thing, which I attempted to try but getting burned by the cli thing I abandoned it. It looks really interesting - it's a meta-harness, built and shipped with one of the Spec-Something frameworks, where you define your own specs for your projects, kinda like snake-eating-it-own-tail-of-specs. If spec-driven is The Future, they are at least trying.
There have been a few other things I can't recall, but my observation is that they are taking generative AI seriously as an existential threat, and probably (as another poster here put it) "heating the office burning tokens".
Long time JB user here, and I mean long time. The past year I have been using claude in the JB terminal but nothing, and I mean nothing new has come of it in that year. Stuck in a tiny terminal window, opening files every so often. A couple months ago I switched back to iTerm2, full screen and use sublime to open the odd file every so often. So this makes 100% sense. They need to do a better job integrating with agents and not pushing their own.
So a stable company like JetBrains, which sells developer tools and has extensive experience in compilers, ended up with a net financial loss. Meanwhile, Cursor—a startup only a few years old, founded by students, built on a VS Code fork, and primarily powered by OpenAI's API—was valued at $60 billion.
This financial loss is a report at a point in time about that point in time. A company's valuation is also reported at a point in time but it represents an aggregation of how much profit the company might generate across time (please forgive the layman's understanding). They are apples and oranges.
capitalism optimizes for crap
By Musk, from a company who was doing an IPO and has to deliver flashy things fast.
Don't overestimate the relevance to this.
Hopefully this is a wake-up call for them to drop the AI hype-chasing and refocus on making the best IDEs for us dinosaurs who, for whatever crazy reason, still code by hand and appreciate solid (deterministic) tools to help us out.
On a very related note, I'm probably very late to this discussion, but has anyone else noticed autocomplete in JetBrains products has gotten significantly worse after the advent of LLMs? It would previously take into account type signatures and all kinds of context, now it's clearly just a very minimal next token generator, often producing code that doesn't even compile.
The real surprise is how small their balance sheet is given they're such a well known and loved name. 16m CZK is 0.7m USD annual revenue.
There are companies where you'd rather be the owner, and others where you'd rather be an employee, or a customer. I think the JetBrain's customers are the real winners in this one.
> 6m CZK is 0.7m USD annual revenue.
It's 16,000 * 1 million CZK, so ~730m USD, no?
The metric itself is in millions, so the value is 16 billion CZK ~= 738 million USD
16,000 * 1,000,000 -> 16,000,000,000 -> 16B CZK ~= 738M USD
0.7M USD annual revenue for Jetbrains? That can't be right. Their annual revenue is 400M+ USD from my quick search.
They have't really given us something for the new era and they are positioned to be ahead of everyone
I cancelled my JetBrains subscription a year ago when they announced price increases.
The quality of their software has been falling despite all recurring revenue. I used JetBrains for almost a decade because it just worked. JetBrains Toolbox is some of the worst software I've used, it causes more problems that it solves for me.
Needing to install a different IDE per language is also something I dislike about JetBrains, but not a deal breaker.
Revenue is up. Looks like they took on a lot of debt. What did they spend it on?
JetBrains is a privately held s.r.o. (LLC equivalent in the Czech Republic), I wonder where have Helgi Library gather so much detailed financial data from about them?
Its pretty sad because JetBrains products are great ive been using them for a while and its even free for students. VSC is great but i feel like JB products are more refined since I code in Go and Python.
I still love my IDEA & Rider, but a lot of my attention has moved to VSCode with Claude Code plugin. The Claude plugin/tooling for these IDE's is abysmal in comparison (talking strictly about the Claude Code experience here - not the bundlende AI Assistant.
I am not moving away from JetBrains anytime soon, but it does gets harder to justify when I spend considerable time in a competing offering that has better experience and is free...
That’s interesting, as we have just completed a huge migration of our CI/CD infrastructure off Teamcity, for plenty of reasons but “we’re paying a shit ton of money for this and it’s a pain in the ass” was a major one.
They seem to be very bloated and unable to modernize their product lines.
I've been thinking about doing the same, what did you migrate to? I was thinking GitHub actions but the outage yesterday reinforced that it might be a bad idea.
We migrated to buildkite, as it allowed self hosted agents and lots of “building blocks” to extend stuff ourselves.
One of the things we really use heavily is dynamic pipelines, as we have a lot of different stuff.
In teamcity, we had close to 1k build configs, and were able to replace this with about 20 dynamic pipelines in buildkite.
We did need to do a bunch of plumbing, but in this age of AI it means our developers don’t have to rely on devops anymore to get their stuff done to make all this work.
One of the problems was that our devs were “afraid” to alter teamcity build configs, as it all was more fragile than it should be and they were afraid to break stuff.
Teamcity allows for customization with plugins, but all that is so bloated with either Java or Kotlin and requires a shitton of domain specific knowledge to pull off.
Buildkite is much simpler with YAML and their plugin infrastructure which is effectively just hooks into scripts. It’s well designed.
I agree, build kite really blew me away. I know everyone tried to make simple yet powerful abstractions but it usually fails; build kite was the opposite where it was surprisingly better than I expected
Interesting, what did you migrate to? We've had mixed results in reliability between ADO and Github actions.
That is an interesting piece of reporting.
First, revenue is growing, assets - too. I believe company does some money burning to compete. According to the prev years nett income, they should have collected a reasonable amount of money so a little money burn doesn't harm.
Second, the Gross Profit is only 72.1m whereas the Revenue is 675m. That means, 600m is somewhere in the COGS. Not sure how to read this.
Around a year ago, the org I was working for ditched jetbrains (including teamcity) due to alleged Russian links of some of the founders/owners of jetbrains.
Never looked into it further, but might be a factor...
They put out multiple statements in support of Ukraine. They also indefinitely closed their Russian offices.
https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/03/11/jetbrains-stateme...
https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/12/06/update-on-jetbrai...
Jetbrains lost our entire (small) team a few years back when they completely neglected (no, to minimal progress for years) their typehint support in PyCharm. I think they now finally have caught up somewhat judging from the updated on all the issues in youtrack I'm still subscribed to.
Engineers abandoning IDEs or did they burn a ton of cash on AI?
I have paid out of pocket for Jetbrains for 15 years. I don’t think I’ve opened it in the past year and should probably cancel my subscription.
For me, the things that made Jebteains great just don’t matter anymore.
What do you use then?
I still use it a lot for reviewing the code.
It is a good code viewer but way too heavy if you want to switch between branches often on a sufficiently large product.
VSCode for the rare time I need to view a file.
GitHub or Tuicr for code review. Still waiting for an agentic first review environment- which Jetbrains has missed the ball on.
You'll be surprised (or not) to find out a lot of people aren't using anything. Claude gets asked to build it, then some other clown uses their copy of Claude to do the PR review and then it gets merged.
given that their revenue is still increasing, I'm guessing it's the latter
Their revenue is increasing, but their profits have been on a decline despite increased revenue. The table on that page only goes back to 2021, but the trend of increasing revenue and decreasing profits has been going on at least that long. I don’t think ai would have been a factor that far back. Even though github copilot did launch sometime around then, I doubt it was much of a factor.
What stands out to me is https://www.helgilibrary.com/companies/jetbrains/total-cash-...
I have no idea what that contains, but it appears to be a rather large dip, compared to previous years. Overall it's not really that interesting without context and commentary from JetBrains.
I find IntelliJ IDEA a great tool, even for my fully vibecoded apps. I edit the READMEs in it, look at the version history, use it for debugging, for builds, and so on.
My guess is that people aren't abandoning their IDEs. Their market is probably growing. I suspect they're burning money on subsidized inference, just like everybody else.
Like or not, LLM are getting better at debugging than humans... Not sure for how long will companies will keep paying for IDEs (which, tbf, are peanuts compared to the LLM cost).
Why not both?
If engineers are abandoning IDEs then shouldn't they be following the engineers?
Both
The truth is there is no money to be made from (good) offline software.
They keep trying to bite into AI but they should focus on making their tools more stable and should have invested more into Kotlin Native, could of had a fully native IDE and tooling by now and purged reliance on the JVM.
They could have bought out Cursor early on too.
Oh I very much doubt Cursor ever considered selling to a small shop in eastern Europe.
Cause Cursor was so massive? JetBrains is not just some random niche company, they're used in 88 companies out of the Fortune 100, that's nothing to sneeze at.
If you open a terminal in their IDEs, top right button, Claude Code, enable MCP. For me, it's the best mix of the two worlds.
Keep rounding UI and adding more AI, and finances will keep going down.
What caused "Net Financing Costs" to skyrocket? Here is a historical view: https://www.helgilibrary.com/companies/jetbrains/net-financi...
I don't think they can compete with AI IDEs. They should maybe focus on the niche that they are good at, and completely get rid of anything ML/AI related. It's going to be a lot cheaper.
It's better to be the king of a niche.
> They should maybe focus on the niche that they are good aT
Ironically, back then they praised JetBrains for not following hype staying focused on IDE and Dev environment
like what , manually refactor code in hours, when agent can do it for you in minutes, or setting up debug/dev env when agent can also do that for you?
Manually refactor code in days if need be, when you have something specific in mind and intend a particular result.
'refactor' isn't just a blender. If I wanted agentic coding I would just do that. I'm quite happy for other people to so completely entangle themselves in agentic coding that they can't get out. Please proceed.
to add: I'm a paying JetBrains customer, but they could lose me if they vibecode themselves into a pile of slop. I'm not sure they're doing that, even if they're dabbling in it. I think there's still expertise there.
This would make sense for me, as a long time Jetbrains user and not desiring to use AI for anything apart from single line code completion, which the current Jetbrains tools do quite well.
I have used their support before, to be extremely impressed. This is an area that they could differentiate themselves in.
They could establish a foothold in AI accelerated development but they sadly aren't doing it, instead focusing on "developing agents" (aka openclaw/pi/codex/claude simulacrum #9998).
LLM spending. Playing catchup
I’m trying to contextualize this information. JetBrains isn’t publicly traded best as I can tell, and these numbers come from other public filings:
> Figures are the company's own (unconsolidated) statutory statements filed with the Czech business register…
Are these as reliable as the U.S. 10K or its European equivalent?
I assume that a company like JetBrains would be investing in shifting products around A.I., so it doesn’t seem too surprising that they don’t report a profit for 2025.
https://or.justice.cz/ias/ui/rejstrik-$firma?p%3A%3Asubmit=x...
then Sbirka listin and download the filings. It's all in Czech so put it through GPT for translation
Summary:
JetBrains s.r.o. went negative because a large foreign-exchange loss overwhelmed a much smaller operating profit. The report explicitly identifies CZK 1.516 billion of currency losses caused by the Czech koruna strengthening against major foreign currencies. But “it was just accounting” would be incomplete: operating profit also fell 63.2%. These accounts use Czech accounting rules, not IFRS.
So two separate things happened: operations deteriorated by CZK 1.291 billion, and the financial result deteriorated by CZK 2.016 billion. Lower taxes cushioned the fall rather than causing it. Approximately 61% of the deterioration before tax came from the financial section and 39% from operations.
For cash generation, the reported operating cash flow is positive—but requires caution. It increased from CZK 5.059 billion to CZK 6.353 billion. However, the 2025 statement includes CZK 6.672 billion of positive net working-capital adjustments, while its before-working-capital subtotal is negative CZK 60.926 million. The positive final figure therefore should not be read as CZK 6.353 billion of recurring cash earnings.
Removing only that disclosed currency loss would produce CZK 1,191.121 million of profit before tax. That is a mechanical sensitivity calculation—not an IFRS profit figure or a fully currency-neutral result. It leaves derivative gains and all other reported amounts unchanged, and it should not be treated as adjusted after-tax profit. The report says the 2025 “other financial income” line consists mainly of derivative income.
Impressive European business with ~750m USD in revenues and global footprint. Hope they innovate themselves into profitability again
The new AI script-kiddies might not be in the target market for purchasing an IDE, so i think their customer base may potentially be shrinking.
Which is a shame really - this is similar to old blacksmithing tools.
I loved IntelliJ for Java, but I cancelled as I have been AI-pilled to never need to write code again.
I would love if the Jetbrains IDE's got really good agent integration, all their code analysis could have amazing synergy with LLM's, Unfortunatly for now I disabled all AI features as it was slowing my IDE (JetBrains) to a crawl.
I thought JetBrains is a private/bootstrapped company.
Where are these financials coming from?
It isn't as much the price of a license as much as the time it takes to get approval for newer engineers and contractors. You can just say, "we use vs code with these extensions and wsl2" and the discussion is over.
They probably have very good financial cushions. One year of losses is nothing to a company like that.
This along with stack overflow seems to be the end of an era. Stack overflow had my back and JetBrains was like a super magical tool that I could tackle code bases with.
Unfortunate because they make great products, but also expected given AI. A bit like Nokia, they're a great company that didn't do anything particularly wrong but they got swept by a superior technology.
An IDE connects a human coder to the development process. If the role of that coder changes in that process, the IDE connection is not going to be as heavy as it used to be.
Either a whole lot of money is about to be sucked out of markets or money is about to massively devalue. This is the bill coming due for the zero interest rate years, seen from one company's vantage point.
Software is changing. It would be a good time to invest rather than to focus on the bottom line. Their revenue is up.
I’m not surprised.
They only need to have some hundreds of billions of loss extra, and they might be the next big thing!
So VSCode is actually having an impact, most likely.
I hate the JetBrains IDE, which is written in Java. Why can't they re-write it in C++ using Qt or wxWidgets?
It's much more work to make a cross platform GUI app with C++, even if your toolkit is cross platform like Qt. Different compiler tool chains, different system level API's, ARM vs x64 etc.
This is why we see so many Electron apps these days (though Jetbrains was shipping IDE's before electron existed).
They need to put a whole lot of love in Junie, but even at that Warp is already miles ahead... so playing catch up is going to be a tough one.
I am a long time JetBrains subscriber to the all products pack. Their response to recent AI events has been extremely lackluster and I've given them this feedback directly, in feedback and otherwise.
I doubt I will remain a subscriber for the entirety of next year.
Let's look at their AI product, it suuuuucks. They released it, and it literally did not function. I purchased it, and it kept giving me licensing errors. Contacted support and they couldn't tell me anything. Okay, cool, cancel it and refund me. This is useless.
That was a while ago. Today, it still sucks. AI Chat is a bolted-on afterthought that looks like a hackathon project and functions like one. Isn't deeply embedded in the editors. Clunky. Slow. Ugly to look at. Doesn't integrate nicely with all the tools. No native AI plugins, you're forced into their garbage.
What are they DOING?!?
10yr+ All Products Pack subber as well, cancelled in August.
They really didn't do well with AI integration the past few years. When Cursor was all the rage, JetBrains was pushing their own service whose pricing wasn't transparent and just didn't hold up to SotA. I'd still agree that using Codex or Claude from CLI is a better user experience.
Yet, looks like their revenue is up. Wonder where they're investing.
It's amazing that it even costs extra. Basic functionality shouldn't cost an extra fee, period.
I'm paying hundreds of dollars to use the IDE. The least they could do is integrate well with other harnesses (like every other text editor in the world does).
loss size must be correlated with the memory usage of webstorm on my work machine...
Android Studio always was Google acquisition bait, but now they are going to need to be more serious about it.
Seems as if their expenditures increased a little bit. I don't think this is huge, since they did not perform that well in 2022 either.
No disrespect meant, but I don't see how companies like JetBrains can survive (and I've read their financial statements, their revenue growth is still decent). All their revenue comes from products and services that are effectively a long-form agentic session, proven by how many OSS replicas of their stack is out there. Their Junie agent (itself a replica of all other agents on the market) can ITSELF be replicated in a few dozen prompts, as evidenced by the 1000+ GitHub agent repos out there, most of whom are operated by a single college student. What's worse is that JetBrains' primary customer base is supposed to be composed of technical users and developers, the exact cohort that should be skilled enough to use LLMs to replicate their services for effectively zero cost. I guess the only thing that's saving them is inertia and goodwill.
All the air is getting sucked out of software companies due to AI, I'm seeing it happen in a number of places. Though in this case it may be due to their own AI investment on internal projects.
they've made a series of customer-hostile decisions in the past few years, so this investment is likely this freight train gathering pace
they're finished
Why? Revenue still up. Investment.
why this is a surprise? I have 0 reasons to buy IDE in 2026.
Their main moat was smart refactor, and a few other nice tools to debug. regardless of what you think about coding is done, agents and your harness is the best tool. I heard they doing business accelerator to find a new business ideas. But as a company, hardly imagine anyone buying expensive IDE in 2 years. Why?
> regardless of what you think about coding is done, agents and your harness is the best tool.
I guess you're all in on that Anthropic IPO with the "coding is solved" approach.
There will always be people that write code with pen and paper. Its going to be an art form though rather than something productive.
> why this is a surprise? I have 0 reasons to buy IDE in 2026.
If the first part follows the second, the surprise is that revenue is up while the prevailing opinion appears to be "no-one needs to buy an IDE".
IDEs are on a steep decline, so not so surprising. I've disabled most code extensions from vscode and find myself using multiple terminals and the built in git diff UI. I barely see the code _as a whole_, only care about the _code_ changes.
edit: added the extra words + I must mention I'm talking about legacy maintenance projects
Yep, I don't remember the last time I opened up an IDE anymore. I mainly built my own open source AI coding orchestrator lol: https://github.com/saadnvd1/agent-os
The landscape is changing significantly, and I think these types of tools will become more popular.
Yep. Especially considering their primary userbase are technically apt developers, there's zero reason to use any of their products. Especially given how quickly the landscape is changing.