Personal opinion is that JetBrains products have gone down hill the last few years. Tons of memory leaks and performance issues. They are also way behind on the AI front, borderline obsolete in some areas. This is coming from someone who has used jetbrains daily for over a decade
I have the exact opposite experience same thing almost a decade. They were great then there was a phase of really bad performance around 5-6y ago and in the last 3 years it has been much better improving with each version. It is especially much more reactive when indexing large projects or just navigating them.
Most of the young crowd is very biased towards vs code irrespective of the top notch features which intellij is providing, so to win the game against vs code fleet becomes critical.
Agreed, RustRover is by far the best IDE for Rust atm. I also use the AI Assistant which is so toned down that it's actually useful and not full of spam.
What would you suggested instead of JetBrains tools for AI-assisted development?
(I don't just want to hear what everyone says; I specifically I want to hear what JetBrains lovers think about this.)
I was about to go all in on JetBrains becaue I can't stand VSCode, and about to transition from ChatGPT only to trying out in-IDE integrations... but if there's a better thing to try first... all ears.
I've been using Jetbrains IDEs for quite some time. I currently use IntelliJ and Cursor together. Cursor is everything I hoped Jetbains AI would be. The TypeScript support in VSCode and derivatives (like Cursor) is great, unlike Jetbrains. As I already have a license, I switch to IntelliJ for the fantastic Git and DB plugins, as well as the great refactoring and find/replace features. Local History and diffing in Jetbrains is also far superior, so sometimes I use history labels as snapshots in between significant changes from Cursor.
If you're transitioning from ChatGPT pastes to an IDE integration, I would recommend a trial of Cursor. They have acquired SuperMaven, and the autocomplete feature is mostly appropriate and useful. I think the chat-diff-review-apply workflow really tightens and accelerates the feedback loop, as well as the ability to submit an error from the terminal to the chat session with a single click. People say good things about the Compose and Agent features, but I haven't so far been drawn to them to explore.
JetBrains is WAY behind VS-Code and its forks (e.g. Cursor) in terms of AI features.
Their own offering, "Jetbrains AI" absolutely SUCKS (just read the reviews, you'll see why).
Third-party AI plugins are pretty basic. Most just offer inline completions and a chat sidebar. For example, GitHub Copilot for Intellij is a shell of itself: No agent capabilities, or even model switching (although that seems to be coming in a future update).
Generally speaking, Jetbrains seems to have missed the AI code editor revolution, and are now trying to play catch-up. The problem is that their plugin API seems to offer less capabilities than VS-Code when it comes to implementing advanced AI features (think of cursor like features). This, combined with the fact that Intellij products are closed source and can't simply be forked by someone who requires additional capabilities, makes it hard for third parties to build advanced AI features.
PS: I also tested their new "Agent" plugin called Junie (invite only beta). It's really basic (like 30% as good as cursors agent mode), but since it's still in invite only beta this should be taken with a grain of salt.
> Most just offer inline completions and a chat sidebar
As someone who doesn't use AI all that much: what else does an IDE need besides an inline prompt and a ChatGPT window to the side? I've played around with the continue.dev plugin and I can't think of anything else I'd want out of AI assistants with the quality they're at at the moment.
> GitHub Copilot for Intellij is a shell of itself
That's on Github, to be honest. And to be expected. It doesn't make much sense for Microsoft to fund a plugin for a competitor's IDE when they already have their own IDEs to sell.
> Intellij products are closed source
They follow the same protocol Microsoft uses: the core is open, but some language plugin features are proprietary. For Microsoft, the proprietary part is just the C# debugger at this point, whereas IntellJ has a whole bunch of paid-for plugins that are closed-source. Still, you can fork the community edition of IntelliJ should you wish.
I would highly suggest using the jetbrains plug-in "continue". It's BYOK or you can connect it to Ollama. Supports refactoring, inline, RAG, chat, etc.
I rather like the idea behind Continue.dev, especially when I have Ollama with some larger models running on a server somewhere.
However, I have to say that it's a bit buggy, some things like running together with the SonarQube plugin breaks it, other times UI elements for keyboard shortcuts just hang around on the screen when they shouldn't be visible/present. There's a good deal of stuff in their issue tracker: https://github.com/continuedev/continue/issues?q=is%3Aissue%...
That said, I had a pretty good experience with the GitHub Copilot plugin, as long as you're willing to pay for it.
I use the PyCharm CoPilot plugin. Works great. Can't comment on how good the CoPilot model is vs say Claude or ChatGPT, but it seems decent for what I use it for (autocomplete, small snippets, stuff that I'd look up in the docs or SO, etc.)
I have the opposite experience. Intellij works well, fewer crashes and no ai crap that gets in my way. Too many developers rely on shitty ai crutches and you can easily snuff them out because their code is shit.
Yeah, agreed, long time user, just let my sub lapse. I don't like VSCode like I did IDEA but all the features are there, and more, much more. The AI integration and choices (Cursor, Trae, RooCode, Aide, Windsurf, PearAI, etc etc etc) are way better and honestly take the place of a lot of stuff Jetbrains had an advantage on. Also Jetbrains stuff is often not working or unreliable - developing within Docker containers, for one, and it keeps popping up with their shit AI assistant that you can't disable. Honestly, what is this, Clippy and MS Office?
