Previously, using IDEs from JetBrains was an attribute of a good programmer. What did we love them for?

  • many linters
  • advanced code navigation

So errors were quickly found (even without compilation) and you could quickly find needed places in code.

There were (and are) other positive aspects. The main minuses could always be attributed to price and a noticeable number of errors. IDE exceptions still appear quite often for me, usually no less than once a day.

Nevertheless, I myself bought a license for all IDEs with my own money. And gave positive feedback inside companies, which led to license purchases. But that’s in the past, I no longer plan to renew and moreover use. Maybe still sometimes for a while, when it’s unclear how to do something in a new tool and it’s faster to launch something familiar. I don’t think there will be much of that, but I don’t exclude it yet.

What happened?

  • VS Code with ecosystem noticeably improves every month for years now. Not to say that changes in JetBrains over a year are comparable to changes in VS Code over a month, but sometimes that impression forms. So it was just a matter of time.
  • Fleet (direct competitor to VS Code) failed, as it’s been sitting in Public Preview for a long time.
  • They launched some cloud
  • I haven’t heard of anyone buying their AI subscription. First, we’re used to paying for a local program. This is the same problem as with Apple: local AI without a subscription from these providers is expected. Second, I looked on the site: there you buy credits for plans. The cost in credits is unclear (didn’t find quickly), price comparison with other providers is also unclear. And among programmers there’s no hype on this topic: most likely it doesn’t work very well then, otherwise they’d be raving.
  • There’s Kotlin with ecosystem, but I don’t know how they make money on it, but maybe yes
  • In most languages and frameworks their own linters appeared. Sonarqube appeared. So linters also stopped being an advantage. There’s Qodana, it can be compared with cloud Sonarqube, but by feel it loses.
  • TeamCity – cloud GitHub/Gitlab, as well as local Gitea close this sphere.
  • YouTrack might be interesting, but there are millions of task trackers, no one really stands out

So the main reason for using IDEs – habit. Of course, you can live on it for a while, but not for long. And a completely different aura is forming: it’s no longer something innovative, expensive, that makes you a higher quality programmer – but something that programmers previously learned and they don’t have the strength to retrain on higher quality modern tools.

Paying for support of a new version of some framework might be possible, but compared to VS Code it’s unclear why. And the amounts were always noticeable.

Now renewal costs 179$. That includes 10$ per month for AI credits. Essentially, for the software itself, if you choose credits, 60$. How this relates in price to Cursor is unclear, as I didn’t find credit consumption prices.

And besides IDEs there’s nothing really cool. There’s a feeling that, as happened with browser engines, some new generation of JetBrains IDEs will be based on VSCode with their own settings and their own AI subscription rates.

PS. I looked a bit at AI from JetBrains – it’s not needed even for free, at the level of Continue plugin with local LLM…