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.
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.
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.
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;
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 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.
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 :-)
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 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 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 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.
> 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.
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.
> ...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.
> 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.
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.
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 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/...
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.
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".
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 without breaking other things in the process.
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.
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'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
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.
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.
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 20 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. Now we are considering scrapping it.
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 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.
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).
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’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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 so 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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/
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
What did your python people move to from pycharm? Every team I've worked on has been about 30% python (70% go) and the python people have always had pycharm installed and ready to go for their python days.
I've always had a personal ultimate sub even though I use vscode 99%. There would be a lot more ultimate subs barely used like mine if they weren't 3-4x the price of the singles. I've never felt justified in asking for ultimates business price for how little I use it, but my teams always have a pycharm license.
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 a 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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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'm using the word understanding loosely there, but I couldn't think of another word.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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 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 / ...
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.
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.
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.
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!)
...or they're bailing out of really bad investments before they become even worse ones...
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 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.
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.
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.
> ...inspecting...
I got used to sublime merge to context-switch editing vs reviewing, staging changes line-by-line
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.
Junie is boring, and that's perfect (for me).
The Jetbrains integration is nice, but if you rely on the tool you're probably not going to use the IDE much anyway.
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 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?”
Wonder what the "something big" could be that companies are throwing money into in 2026.
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.
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.
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.
Whether someone else will be left cleaning up the mess (I have been in that position) is a separate question.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958850
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 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.
And I don't use the debugger nowadays. The AI can do it much faster and add relevant instrumentation and parse logs.
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
That there is no lack of people delivering low quality using AI does not change this.
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.
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.
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.
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)
I have seen a bubble sort function in a PR from an engineer with 20 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. Now we are considering scrapping 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.
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.
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.
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.
There is potential to build a better UI than what's constrained within a CLI's grid of characters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
A year or so 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."
For languages like kotlin, java and even python JB is still way ahead of the competition.
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.
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.
At least, that was so in dynamic languages, like Python, and PHP, last I checked.
Microsoft's stuff is quite good, or you've got a really high bar.
> quite good
Good one.
Microsoft has had a very long reputation (for good reason) for having good developer tooling, even if Windows was not particularly developer friendly...
Don't overestimate the relevance to this.
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.
https://www.jetbrains.com/air/
I'm usually working between VSCode and Codex/Claude Code at the same time, but find myself mostly in latter these days.
Can anything serious/complex be done on mobile? I'm genuinely curious. It's seems bizzare in the context of IDE and tooling discussion.
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.
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.
It's 16,000 * 1 million CZK, so ~730m USD, no?
Never looked into it further, but might be a factor...
https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/03/11/jetbrains-stateme...
https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/12/06/update-on-jetbrai...
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...
I've always had a personal ultimate sub even though I use vscode 99%. There would be a lot more ultimate subs barely used like mine if they weren't 3-4x the price of the singles. I've never felt justified in asking for ultimates business price for how little I use it, but my teams always have a pycharm license.
For me, the things that made Jebteains great just don’t matter anymore.
I still use it a lot for reviewing the code.
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.
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.
If engineers are abandoning IDEs then shouldn't they be following the engineers?
They could have bought out Cursor early on too.
They seem to be very bloated and unable to modernize their product lines.
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.
It's better to be the king of a niche.
Ironically, back then they praised JetBrains for not following hype staying focused on IDE and Dev environment
'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.
I have used their support before, to be extremely impressed. This is an area that they could differentiate themselves in.
Which is a shame really - this is similar to old blacksmithing tools.
> 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’m not surprised.
The landscape is changing significantly, and I think these types of tools will become more popular.
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?!?
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).
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?
I guess you're all in on that Anthropic IPO with the "coding is solved" approach.
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".
edit: added the extra words + I must mention I'm talking about legacy maintenance projects