Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs (jetbrains.com)
151 points by drpossum on Dec 19, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 122 comments


I recently started to learn a new programming language and was thinking that CoPilot etc would help me in that regard. I was surprised to find the opposite: whenever I would pause to think about a solution, AI would be polluting my editor with suggestions and completely interrupt my train of thought. ChatGPT has been very handy for random questions about the language, but in-editor suggestions completely ruin any attempt on my part to learn. While I have been very pleased with in-editor-AI for tidying up my code and providing some logical completions, this was the first time that it clicked that AI is really only effective if you already know what you’re doing.


VSCode and CoPilot now has a mode where you ask for suggestions, which is better.

In my Emacs + CoPilot setup, suggestions pop up unasked for which I need to change.


This was one of my main complaints when I tried it, perhaps I’ll give it another shot with that setting. The suggestions automatically appearing made it feel like having a conversation with one of those people who is always jumping to finish your sentences for you, but guessing wrong as to what you were about to say.


Please post your Emacs config if you do make that change.


To clarify submission-

-if you disable the plugin, it will be enabled when you restart.

-if you uninstall the plugin, on restart an old version will appear, enabled, in its place, begging for an update.

However given that JetBrains didn't block either uninstall or disable, the most logical explanation is that this is a bug/unintentional. The rollout of this AI plugin has been really poorly done, with it completely failing to function on the first iteration. You couldn't even login or activate.

Hanlon's razor applies. JetBrains has too good of corporate behaviours to be trying to fool people in this case, and the surrounding evidence all points to a bug.


> JetBrains has too good of corporate behaviours

First time for everything. That’s what they used to say about Google.


> if you disable the plugin, it will be enabled when you restart.

Must be bug or misunderstanding , I disabled it last week and it stayed off, the ticket complains that the plugin can't be wiped but this is not the only plugin that works like that.


I went back in and it turns out there are four separate, related plugins-

AI Assistant

Full Line Code completion

Machine Learning Code completion

Machine Learning in Search Everywhere

I had just been disabling the AI Assistant, which was being re-enabled by one or all of the other three that depended upon it. If I disable all four they do not re-enable.


I checked and I also had the 2 Machine learning plugins enabled, but the AI assistent was never re-enabled. I done a checka dn disabled some other plugins I do not need anymore now.

I was in the beta test for the AI assistant plugin but in my work I only used it 2 or 3 times from curiosity, for me at that time the AI could not help, maybe in future when it can understand the entire project then it would make more sense.


For example, the Kubernetes plugin is also bundled with IDEA.


Worth noting that "enabled" doesn't mean it's actually activated. The plugin explicitly asks you to activate it if you want to use it. So it's not analyzing your code or sending anything to Jetbrains' service.

This is much ado about nothing.


It's the same behavior with the Kotlin plugin - you can't remove it and even when disabled it'll constantly hassle you about updating.

I suspect the root cause is that they want to inflate the numbers of how many people "use" their new service (AI) or language (Kotlin). This way they can just report every single installation of IntelliJ as part of their marketing/sales numbers.


I tested this out and I'm not very impressed. It's a chatbot that has limited access to your source code (the file you have open I believe). The AI doesn't have a complete picture of your project and it would probably be too expensive to ingest thousands of lines of code. The code it generates is... what you come to expect from a coding assistant. It's hit and miss, and it needs heavy refactoring. It feels like this doesn't add too much value to the already existing tooling and Jetbrains should have waited for something better. The current way of prominently pushing it strait to production seems rather unfortunate. I've disabled the plugin.


This is what every company is doing in the name of integrating "Gen AI".

90% of it is chat bots. And in 90% of those places I dont want a chat bot.


Like the grocery store chat bot that recommended mixing bleach and ammonia for a "fresh scent!"


Wait, is that likely but currently hypothetical scenario or a real thing that actually happened? And if it already happened could you possibly provide a source so I have something to pull out when people ask what could possibly go wrong?

Edit: Okay, 30 seconds searching turned up https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/08/ai-po... which features the "Aromatic Water Mix" I assume we're talking about.

Edit2: And yet, replies managed to be even faster than me looking it up myself. Thanks, everyone:)


New Zealand supermarket's recipe-generating AI takes toxic output to a new level - https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/11/supermarket_reins_in_...

> One user decided to play around with the chatbot, suggesting it create something with ammonia, bleach, and water. Savey Meal-bot obliged, spitting out a cocktail made with a cup ammonia, a quarter cup of bleach, and two liters of water.

> Mixing bleach and ammonia releases toxic chloroamine gas that can irritate the eyes, throat, and nose, or even cause death in high concentrations.

> The chatbot obviously wasn't aware of that at all. "Are you thirsty?," it asked. "The Aromatic Water Mix is the perfect non-alcoholic beverage to quench your thirst and refresh your senses. It combines the invigorating scents of ammonia, bleach, and water for a truly unique experience!"


Real. A recipe bot, of all things, which makes it even worse that it's suggesting not only a combination with toxic side effects, but something that wouldn't have been edible anyway.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/11/supermarket_reins_in_...


When specifically prompted to do something involving mixing bleach and ammonia.


It's evidence to me of the LLM or whatever's inability to reason in the slightest. It's currently unsuitable and dangerous as is.

[edit: In fact, we know how it is implemented, and it does NOT reason - there is no implementation of reasoning, only putting word/concepts/forms together that are plausible. ]


https://cursor.sh is trying to make the actually useful AI coding assistant, where it has access to your whole project for context


This is a cynical take. JetBrains knows what's best for its business. It knows that Microsoft presents a clear and present danger to extincting them and all of their hard work.

LLMs have a huge role in the future of engineering, whether or not you like it. They present massive productivity boosts. I'm a senior Rust engineer and I've seen my development time nearly cut in half after using LLMs. And we're just getting started.

If JetBrains doesn't start adopting this tech at a feverous pace, they're toast.

This is life or death.


This is just a sample size of n=1.

I personally don't use these but worked with a guy who leaned heavily on LLMs for a group project. He was really good at quickly shitting out boilerplate but couldn't actually explain any of it or understand the spec in the documents

Imo, the consequences of letting people who suck appear to be doing stuff is more severe than a 50% productivity boost for others. I would rather work somewhere that bans using them outright after this experience. There's my n=1 for anyone interested


To be fair, I think there are tens of thousands (or more) people saying these things.

I just posted an anecdote down thread of how it's empowering our senior engineers.


I still have no idea how people get so productive with the use of LLMs. I've had it maybe cut out some boilerplate for me occasionally but that's about it. So many times the solutions are wrong or poorly written.

It's not useless, but it has certainly not been a 2x improvement.


It probably comes down to what your practice of programming is.

If it's "search for code snippets that might do what you want, copy/paste, change and adapt until it mostly works," then, yeah, LLMs are going to be a huge time saver.

If it's "sit there and think about what you need to do, then write and debug it," then LLMs aren't quite a force-multiplier. Honestly, good auto-complete and decent software architecture are probably at least as effective as an LLM when it comes to composing code.

Over-simplifying here, but you get my gist. The latter method still benefits hugely from LLMs when it comes to boilerplate code. And there's still a lot of boilerplate code in programming! Today I was asking ChatGPT if it could scrape info out of HTML, and it autonomously wrote a Python script to do it for me when I asked to work on a larger chunk of data.


Yeah, I found it very useful when I was writing some bash scripts where I don't quite remember the substitution commands but know what I need to do and what a correct solution looks like, so I could just use it to generate the command with a comment.

However, I was using it when learning Rust and it was just generating awful inefficient code, but I only discovered that it was inefficient when I read the docs. My manager is in love with LLMs and try to apply them everywhere at work, including providing a summary of the changes in a github PRs. The generated text is many times just plain wrong and so I never read it, and I am scared of people who actually do use it. Someone created a wiki for ocaml filled with a bunch of LLM content, and so much of it contains commands that don't exist or just plain inaccurate information about how OCaml works. I think LLMs seem pretty harmful in these cases and when I read about people using it for learning it horrifies me a bit.

So my fear is that it can enable you to be lazy and not understand what you are doing, and it ends up harming you and everyone around you. However, when you understand what you are doing, it can help you generate boilerplate or save you a lookup.


I'm in the middle of a massive migration. Tables, joins, APIs, and lots of plumbing are changing. (Ordinarily we'd sequence this into phases, but we're moving fast.)

I got a 3,000 line change in yesterday without getting bored. All while I'm also juggling a ton of other responsibilities.

Tab, yep that's right. Tab, yep, tab yep. Tab, yep.

This tech makes a huge difference. It even helped write the tests.

I'm not being lazy. I'm a recent convert.

Moreover, two of my colleagues are entirely new to Rust, and the time at which they've both been able to learn not only the language fundamentals but the codebase astounds me. They're of course reading all they can, but this tooling makes for one of the best tutors.


ChatGPT for me as been very helpful in languages/tools I'm not comfortable with, or don't want to invest the time to read the docs/ complete learn.

The biggest impact for me - Trying to use CLI tools without reading a ton of docs/trial and error - Chrome extensions (for simple tasks like content editing/augmenting, it gets you 90% of the way there) - Drawing an app layout and getting back a Flutter project


Death. They just killed trust in their products. Code Security. Code Copyright. It was the manner in how they implemented it.

"We also sign contracts / agreement to do the work. Some of the clauses in those contracts (at least mine) are very strict describing who can have access to the code/data and what level of access and in which region(s). At this moment I am uncertain about it myself which potentially makes me the party that is breaking the terms of the contract. For example, I have no answer to the question "is it possible that some code/data has been seen by government sponsored actors in USA or Russia?" - I have no answer to that."


drama is one part of life, yes


Such an unnecessary one. Save it for film and stage.


I tried the JetBrains AI copilot and was pretty unimpressed. On a whim I decided to try out the GitHub CoPilot plugin and I've been pretty blown away by it. When I'm writing dumb boilerplate code it often times gives me a correct suggestion before I can even think about it. I've found myself just tab-completing through big blocks 99% correct code. The lower cognitive overhead for cranking out easy code is well worth the $10/month for me. Of course it's not a huge help with anything complicated, but I've found it doesn't get in the way enough to have much of a downside.


The reason I stick with vim/emacs isn't because of the "fast editing", it's because they're modular and easy to build plugins for. I've built many job specific plugins for both editors as well as wrapped new command lines tools this way, and it's always increased my productivity far beyond what modal bindings has done for me. This is how I've been approaching LLMs, by building my own plugin. I build my own tools that behave as I would expect them to, which is generally to get out of the way unless I ask for them, and work in a pipe like manner.

Having a programmable programming environment with an open source core that's easy to dissect is really what modern editors lack. Also, having a piece that can't be removed or a black box doing who knows what with my code is hard for me to even wrap my head around. To each there own.


The choice of freedom is underrated in our industry. It's sad that today someone who deliberately chooses a FOSS option instead of VSCode or Jetbrains IDE is considered a weirdo.

I chose Vim and Emacs. Nobody forced me into that. Nobody offered me money for using them. No one ever advertised them to me. I chose them because I am 100% absolutely sure that they can never be sold, acquired, embraced, and extinguished. They’re guaranteed to never have telemetry I can’t control. They will never show ads, useless pop-ups, or annoying banners. They will never have a subscription model or pricing structure. They won’t have a huge fragmentation problem. They will always have free and unlimited support from the community and will never steal or take my data hostage. Now, that is a choice. A deliberate, strategic, long-term survival mode decision.

I'm just too tired of losing my money, time, and effort on things that inevitably at some point will limit me, lock me in, steal my data or store it in a way that's too hard to export and convert into something else.

Not to mention, Emacs is such an incredible glue. It's mind-blowingly amazing. You can make it "talk" to any third-party service or a command-line app.


I feel really sorry for JetBrains. They've built, over a long time, a company that makes money from actually good engineering and I was happy to pay for their products for a long time. Then VSCode happened and there just doesn't seem to be a point any more :(


A few days ago JetBrains put in their answer to other coding AI assistants into their IDES, but decided on top of the nags for their new paid service have made it so it can't be completely removed.

If you try to do the normal thing and uninstall or disable it, it appears to just reinstall itself or continues with nags.

I'll say nothing on work environments where code cannot be sent anywhere for security and privacy purposes, but this is just openly hostile user behavior from a company that used to do relatively well.

Shame on you JetBrains


I haven't upgraded yet. I may have to pin my version so it doesn't upgrade.

For someone who wasn't in their AI trial, then gets this as a subscriber. It sure feels shitty. And Fleet doesn't looks much better. Maybe it is time to look at VSCode again... it's been 6-9 months.


I finally cancelled my subscription for their ultimate package as it just kept going up and up in price. They used to be really good for having 3 year discounts, and paying $80 or $100 for a fairly good ide wasn't the end of the world, but VSCode has gotten really good and paying like 160/180/200 a year out of pocket just doesn't make sense to me.


Ultimate is $101/yr (year 3+). I can think of very few things that provide even a fraction of the value at that low of a cost. And no, I don't see VSCode as equivalent to IDEA Ultimate, not in the slightest. Maybe with many, many hours of config I could get it close but even then VSCode plugins are so painful to manage and configure (and make sure they don't step on each other's feet).


I had the all products pack, so I guess it wasn't just ultimate. Between 2019 and 2022 it went from $89 to $149 + tax, so 160/year. I did not receive a 67% increase in value during that time.

I used to have the same view about idea vs vscode, but the MS provided plugins are solid these days and some of the other ones that are community are equally rock solid.

Things where IntelliJ used to just beat the crap out of code, like managing development environments or debugging are now either on par or better than IntelliJ. I even have it setup for remote debugging and serial debugging embedded devices.


It's very easy to fact check, just use the web archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20180602022113/http://www.jetbra.... All products pack was $149 + tax in 2018, now it's $173 + tax, so only 16% increase. Probably it's even cheaper now if adjusted for inflation. And $89 was the cost of only IntelliJ Ultimate.


My most recent invoice from Jetbrains was $109. In the previous 4 years, it was $96. I have the 40% continuity discount since I first purchased a license in 2015. I have the "IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate" license, FWIW.

I don't see myself switching to another IDE. $109 is a drop in the bucket. I also use VSCode, mostly for non-code text editing. Relearning and configuring keybinds would be enough to keep me on Jetbrains unless they absolutely screw the pooch.


I mentioned in another comment I must have been mistaken, I had the all products pack. I went from $89/year in 2019 to $149/year in 2022 which was a 67% price hike.


I think IDEA Ultimate was $89 back then and the All Products was $149 until last year. Are you sure you had the All Products pack the whole time?


Yep, that's what the invoice says... was $90 since like 2014 or 2015 when I bought it.


For background, I have no skin in this game. I use JetBrains IDEs and have the AI plugin disabled, but only because I haven't found it to be helpful.

The issue is simple, though. By making the presence of the plugin mandatory, regardless of its enabled/disabled/active/inactive status, the IDE falls foul of corporate rules against the installation of AI at many organisations.

It doesn't matter how easy it is to deactivate; if an InfoSec rule states no AI software then the whole IDE becomes untouchable.

The response that the installation is mandatory because it is a bundled plugin is both irrelevant and a choice by JetBrains. As long as the AI plugin is installed the IDE is forbidden by those corporate rules. There's no leeway, no persuasion possible, and no mitigations that will satisfy. It really is black and white.


I feel the same way with AWS Q on the console. It refuses to stop nagging me.


Gleaned from various tickets on the JetBrains bug tracker:

You can't uninstall it, you can only disable it. That's because it's a built in plugin, those can't be disabled without breaking incremental upgrades (which personally I don't use anyway).

And like many others here, my corp explicitly forbids ANY use of ANY 3rd party LLM technologies at work. It's a disciplinary matter. So JB forcing something on people that means they could potentially lose their jobs for using IntelliJ is just monumentally stupid.

There is a workaround which is to manually delete the plugin, see https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/LLM-1760/Can-not-remove... But as above, that breaks incremental upgrades.


To quote myself in the YouTrack thread.

> This is excess hubris from a Product Manager who decided it was a good idea to force a plugin on users. This is hostile behaviour. I bet the conversation went like this: "Yeah, they'll learn to love it; it's soooo great what we have to offer with this cutting-edge technology!"

I really do hope they reconsider this Product choice.

> I reckon they need to recoup the investment of running AI servers; I know it's crazy expensive, but JetBrains, this is not the way.

I bet because of the investor pressure, they had no choice but to jump on the AI bandwagon this way. Between the sword and the wall, CoPilot is going to eat their bacon.


They aren't focusing the plugin on you. You have to buy the subscription to use it and you can disable it.

JetBrains has no investors. They aren't a VC funded company.

They are providing an AI plugin because they know the majority of programmers today are using AI assistants when programming. So it probably a good idea to provide one with their IDEs.


"force a plugin on users" literally it says "Activate?" and you just close the window ffs


ah, non-removeable software, how lovely. eat ai cause we tell you to.


I thought it was going to be part of my subscription. Lost my trust in JetBrains after seeing I needed to do some extra-steps to remove it.


I wonder if they plan to rename the "All Products Pack" to "Some Products Pack". Lol


I'd rather not have an AI tax embedded in the "All Products Pack".


Did you manage to remove/disable it completely? If so, how did you do it?


What is with this outrage over a bundled plugin? Is it two minutes of hate for yet another AI chat bot? You can't even use it without first starting a 7-day trial, or purchasing the separate AI service subscription for it. Organization accounts even have to authorize use so that removes possible IP concerns.


I think it comes down to expectations being betrayed, even if the expectations aren't correct.

For me, I pay Jetbrains every year because I want a fully local IDE. I absolutely do NOT want any kind of cloud integration because that means my workflow becomes dependent on Jetbrains or whatever third party is powering the integration. At that point, all of the value of Jetbrains is gone, at least for me, and I could use any other editor. VSCode is much easier to use with dev containers based on my experience.

The other thing that's frustrating is the willingness to ship code off to some third party server / service. Again, I'm paying to NOT have that.

Personally, I don't think Jetbrains will hold out much longer and this is a sign of that. If the people making these decisions have enough power (internally) to put a cloud connected AI assistant in my face, I think it's only a matter of time until they become infested with service based monetization schemes that turn their products into the same junk we're seeing from everyone else in the industry.

Jetbrains needs to re-evaluate what their customers are paying for because they seem to be misguided.

I see some people singing the praises of AI which hasn't been my experience. Any time I ask it about a topic where I'd consider myself an expert, it's wildly wrong. It only seems useful when I ask it about topics where I have very little understanding because the responses are confident sounding and well organized.

So my hunch is that people finding it useful are probably below average developers that don't know what they don't know.


> I absolutely do NOT want any kind of cloud integration because that means my workflow becomes dependent on Jetbrains or whatever third party is powering the integration.

Nothing has changed. The plugin is enabled by default but it does nothing unless activated. "Enabled" doesn't mean it's doing anything.

> Again, I'm paying to NOT have that.

So don't.

>So my hunch is that people finding it useful are probably below average developers that don't know what they don't know.

Nope, I'm definitely an excellent developer and I find it useful.


> Nothing has changed. The plugin is enabled by default but it does nothing unless activated. "Enabled" doesn't mean it's doing anything.

I'm not talking about this feature exclusively. This is a good integration for them to justify charging extra and to justify a dependence on a third party service that you can't host locally.

If this is viewed as a success for them, there's a lot of incentive for the next feature to be a service based cloud integration. And the next and the next... Suddenly we'll be 5 years into the future and development workflows will be completely dependent on cloud integrations and, as developers, we'll be subjected to terms and conditions that are detrimental to us because we don't have any other options.

Look at how Microsoft is moving Office into the cloud. When you try to open a document everything defaults to getting you to interact with, and rely on, OneDrive. Most of the collaborative features already rely on OneDrive. Once they've discontinued perpetual licenses and everything is subscription based, they'll probably make it even harder to rely on plain old documents on the local file system.

Who do you think that benefits more, you or Microsoft? Where's your leverage when Microsoft says prices are going up? You don't have any because your day-to-day workflow has become dependent on their services. What happens if they ban you? Can you do any work tomorrow?

What I'm saying is the reason I pay Jetbrains is because, in my mind, I'm paying for a product that isn't going to get developed to eventually detriment my interests for the benefit of Jetbrains.

What do you think the long term goal of VSCode is? I think it's to get as many developers as possible to depend on it for their workflow so Microsoft can slowly shift more and more functionality to cloud connected services with the end goal of having everyone pay to have their development environments dependent on premium, for-pay Microsoft services with everything, including your development environment, running on Azure.

Every time something shifts to benefit large corporations at the expense of users there are always people like you in the comments that can't see the downsides if a critical mass of users accept the changes.

> Nothing has changed.

Except Jetbrains is about to get their first taste of what it's like to have some of their customers dependent on a feature that isn't available locally. If it's seen as a financial success, do you think they'll be able to resist the temptation to start moving everything they can to cloud connected features?


> I'm not talking about this feature exclusively.

Well that's weird because:

a) Everyone else is

b) You definitely seem to be talking about it and specifically have targeted your comment to this feature in the comments section about this feature

So it feels a bit weird to now say "it's not about this feature"...

> there's a lot of incentive f

We can sum up virtually all of your post as "something in the future could be bad". OK, yes, something in the future could be bad. That is always true.

> large corporations

JetBrains isn't even VC funded, they're a privately owned and profitable company. Comparing them to Microsoft without addressing this feels disengenous.

> an't see the downsides if a critical mass of users accept the changes.

I mean, I think it's ridiculous to go "look at how JetBrains is changing" in a thread where everyone has misunderstood a minor bug that in no way indicates that JetBrains is changing. They're adding services, wow how awful.

> Except Jetbrains is about to get their first taste of what it's like to have some of their customers dependent on a feature that isn't available locally.

No one depends on this. Your IDE starts up fine without it. You don't need it. You can use a competing plugin (they already exist) that runs locally or in some other service.

> If it's seen as a financial success, do you think they'll be able to resist the temptation to start moving everything they can to cloud connected features?

I think it would be a ridiculous move for them to completely change their core business model to be exclusively service oriented, yes.


A lot of text and it's still not clear what you're trying to say. Just disable the plugin if you don't need it or don't find it useful?


I shouldn't need to disable a plugin like that. In my opinion, it's something that I should need to explicitly enable if I want it. All it takes is one person on a project accepting the prompts to agree to the ToS for everyone. They know it's problem too because commercial accounts can disable the integration for everyone.

And most of what I said was relating to the direction Jetbrains is moving. As soon as they start adding service based integrations, it's a slippery slope and we could end up with IDEs that depend on calling out to Jetbrains' services to function.

That's the exact opposite of what I want from Jetbrains and keeping that kind of stuff out of the IDE is the reason I pay them every year.


Thanks!

I guess the main reason the plugin is enabled by default is to promote it. AI tools are becoming an important part of the development workflow, with a majority of developers using a chat LLM or Copilot (https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/ai/). So the functionality offered by the plugin might be interesting to a large part of the user base. A non-bundled plugin would not be discovered by most users. And for organizations it looks like the AI assistant is disabled by default.

Regarding the direction - LLMs are usually used as a service right now, so there's not much choice. At the same time, JetBrains is also working on local smart completion workflows like https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/14823-full-line-code-co.... Hopefully at some point there'll also be an option to use a local LLM with the AI Assistant.


They call it a plugin, but it's an ad. It wouldn't be any different if they put an ad in the IDE and installed the plugin when you sign up.

> Hopefully at some point there'll also be an option to use a local LLM with the AI Assistant.

I would love something where I could pick the inputs or at least give it inputs that skew results. Right now I think the big problem with AI is bad input. Most of the dataset that's publicly available is junk. A lot of "answers" are people guessing at stuff they don't understand.

Honestly, I don't even know if (or how) LLMs work if you train them with a smaller, more accurate dataset.


GitHub copilot is not enabled by default or installed on vscode, yet tons and tons of people use it. Mostly because it's actually pretty good compared to Jetbrains implementation. You can't force stuff onto your users and not expect some backlash though. Especially for a paid product that could've just as easily made it easy to disable or remove.


Copilot is a 2-year-old product, it's expected that many people use it. I agree it currently may be better than AI Assistant. But LLM functionality is here to stay in IDEs, and most people will use it in one way or another.

Nobody forces stuff onto you. You can disable everything with just one checkbox.


TIL:

"Additionally any project that has a .noai file automatically is excluded from using the AI Assistant even if you have opted in and have an active subscription to the service."


Many plugins can't be completely removed but you can disabled them, was wrong with that?

I disabled this one and it hasn't nag me.


The thing about trust is... Once broken it is hard to recover.

Here we have 2xshitty behaviors, we can see around this product. Who is to say there isn't more we can't see.

Removing it seems 100% reasonable, if only for security purposes.


By this logic you might as well just removed the whole IDE.


I am considering it. Seriously.

The policies of my company are clear on the issue. I can't use a tool I previously used safely... yep. I'll be changing IDEs. I may go back to neovim, emacs, or whatever.


A disabled plugin has virtually no security implications.


But considering you cant uninstall it, how do you know disable does anything?


What? Is your question "how can you trust jetbrains?" or something? I don't understand. Disable disables a plugin. If you're saying "but only if you trust jetbrains" yes, you are running their code on your computer...

If your model is "I don't trust this software" the plugin is irrelevant.


> Disable disables a plugin.

And uninstall uninstalls it. Except in this case when the plugin automatically reinstalls, according to TFA.

And we're talking about something that sends your code to their servers.

Malice, incompetence... still not good.


> And we're talking about something that sends your code to their servers.

For the millionth time - not if you do not activate the plugin.


> For the millionth time - not if you do not activate the plugin.

For the millionth time - uninstall was supposed to uninstall too :)


How about first open after upgrade?

If you upgrade from a older version, it open your previous project with the plugin enabled without asking.


Yeah I don't see the problem with that at all. Intellij packages plugins. Plugins run.

The only issue here is that it's being automatically enabled after it is disabled, which I assume is just a simple bug and not at all the big deal this is being made out to be.


My understanding is that people expect their projects being sent to Jetbrains or whatever servers for analysis and that's not allowed in many environments. I've heard of some workplaces where it's outright forbidden to update idea to this version until further notice.


From what I'm seeing this plugin will not send any data to Jetbrains if you don't activate the backend features, but please let me know if that's incorrect.

Again, this is really more of a conversation for a support forum and not hn...

edit: I just updated and the plugin definitely does not just start sending data, you have to explicitly click 'start trial'.


Alas, it blocks my upgrade totally.

I'm glad your firm lets you send code anywhere. Mine does not.


I don't think that the plugin being enabled sends data anywhere.


AI plugins that analyze and ship your code off need to be able to set more important boundaries by their very nature for many environments, to say nothing of normal privacy expectations.


That isn't what's happening here. The plugin being enabled doesn't do anything except prompt you to activate it. Nothing is shipped off, no 'ai' even runs until you hit 'activate'.



According to the issue, this plugin still nag user after disable


Nags about updates which you can ignore, just like every other plugin.


Expecting users to dodge updates that activate plugins which invalidate work contracts is a pretty short sighted method for developing an IDE.


Oh how the might have fallen. For many years they were the one company that understood developer trust and kept that faith. I’ve seen developers argue for literally months in big companies to get this tooling to be the default and get paid for.

I don’t know who needs to be fired over there, but whoever made this decision needs to be and the company needs to make a public apology and public commitment to remove nag from future products.

This is very brand damaging.


JetBrains's EULA has long been a blank check in terms of sharing information with third parties. Glad to see some light falling in that vicinity.


The "light" in this case being a UI bug that everyone on HN has completely misunderstood because the average HN user can't read?


> the average HN user can't read?

Let's put it to the test.

https://www.jetbrains.com/legal/docs/privacy/third-parties/


Ok they host some services on AWS and GCP, use Zendesk for support tickets, you can log in to JB using a GitHub account, and they use Google Analytics and a 3rd party payment system for billing. What exactly is the problem?


> What exactly is the problem?

Don't expect me to provide an exhaustive list of problems. In support of my "blank check" statement above, CTRL+F, "not limited to".


They're leaving money on the table by not further monetising their users.

Modern capitalism is not about making a product and selling it for a fair price. It's about extracting every last cent by selling your users to other people. Double Dipping is the motto.

The only problem with this is they aren't inserting adverts into you IDE, or indeed why not put adverts in the code you write.


Yet another example of enshitification. When will businesses learn to not be shitty to their users in the name of next weeks profits?


When the stock market decides to punish the companies that do this.


It's _mildly_ infuriating but disable it and move on.


Please don't make such glib uninformed comments: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-341408/Disabling-p...


You keep linking this over and over again and you clearly don't understand what you've linked. The plugin isn't even activated by default, you have to explicitly do so. IT's enabled, meaning the plugin can run, but it doesn't do anything related to AI unless you press the "free trial" or activation buttons.


WRONG. You say that, but read the details and the original thread from what it was cut: "but the bundled older version remains enabled after IDE restart."

THE OLD VERSION IS ENABLED AFTER IDE RESTART.


Please finally read the issue you linked. This happens when you disable the plugin and immediately uninstall a plugin update. If you just disable the plugin it stays disabled.


I don't know what you're going on about. I'll make this as clear as possible:

1. The enabled plugin prompts you to 'activate' the service

2. If you do not activate the service the plugin is enabled but does not use the service

3. There is a minor bug, allegedly (have not reproduced it, and others have tried and failed) where the plugin can be disabled and then it re-enables itself.


Have you actually read the description of this issue? It's a UX bug with the uninstall action.


Oh, come on. It's a high-pressure situation, where they're damned if they don't offer any AI plugins (why are you not as good as X???), and they're damned if they do (why is this freemium crap polluting my otherwise nag-free freeloader experience?)

Things will take a while to settle. Unless your workflow is *truly* broken by the fall-out, save your outrage. And yes, I'm a paying JetBrains customer, don't like their AI offering, but don't really like anyone else's either, so far...


Sure, but you should at least be able to uninstall the plugin. According to the thread it reinstalls itself on each launch


That seems like a minor bug at most? And if the plugin remains enabled, but doesn't do anything, what's the actual issue here?

Rephrased: what's the problem with waiting until the next point release of the affected product before assuming malicious intent?


A plugin that reinstalls itself to ask for money is malicious intent


Counterpoint: if you click once (per product install) to dismiss the "ask for money", then don't touch anything related to the plugin again, you won't hear from it thereafter.

Are we really equating poorly-coded add-ons to malware now? And again, I ask this as someone who lived through the whole broken experience of AI previews in JetBrains products and ignoring all of that. That literally took me less time than typing this comment...


You're saying "a thing that happens is intent" it's literally nonsensical.


Because the whole way they've handled this situation reeks.

Oh, we'll get you on a wait list. Bullshit. Waitlist never came in.

It's OK to say the waitlist closed. Keeping people hopeful is a shitty move.

Then to pull this on launch... (sigh) I didn't want to have to waste time on this shit. I'll go back to VSCode, neovim or whatever if I must.

I'm more frustrated with myself that I trusted them to provide me a year+ of quality service... and that isn't happening.


Believe it or not, but I lived through the whole broken experience of AI previews in JetBrains products by... just ignoring the whole thing.

Sure, I got "sign up now!!!" buttons that did nothing for me. I learned after, like, the first 3 times of clicking these not to do that again.

Then, I was, at some point, able to sign up for the preview. It was underwhelming. Like most other offerings in this space.

Meanwhile, all the core IDE functionality continued working as before... And all was good...


If it's a feature people want, why does it need to be bundled? Won't people seek it out if it's so amazing?

That's a rhetorical question. I know the reason. If they don't bundle it, engagement will be low because people simply don't want it. At best, it's an advertisement in my IDE. At worst it's something that can send my code to an external party.


But even Microsoft does not force GitHub copilot. None of the competition to Jetbrains does it either.


I'm looking forward to using the integration, personally.

This is a low quality submission. You're mad about some issue tracker thing but I don't see how this is relevant to the rest of HN or why this is soooo important.


> I'm looking forward to using the integration, personally.

That's all right and perfectly valid.

What is not is what is described in the linked issue.


> What is not is what is described in the linked issue.

There seems to be a singular issue/ bug, which is that a disabled plugin is being re-enabled after update. This is just a bug, I don't understand why this is HN-worthy.

If the headline were "intellij has a bug where a disabled plugin is being re-enabled" it would be accurate, not-inflammatory, and boring.


So you disable and uninstall the plugin. Then after an update,you're silently running with it on[1]. For my company and a lot of others I know, you are now in violation of your contract with your employer courtesy of a JetBrains bug because they insisted this be an uninstallable plugin.

[1] = https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-341408/Disabling-p...


> Then after an update,you're silently running with it on

Yes, that sounds like a bug to me.

> because they insisted this be an uninstallable plugin.

I don't see a comment from Jetbrains saying that the plugin is supposed to be re-enabled.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: