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JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

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41–50 of 133 posts

Re: JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

#42
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A disabled plugin has virtually no security implications.

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

Re: JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

#43
post #30
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

#44

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…

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.

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.

Re: JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Re: JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

#46
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.

Re: JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Re: JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

#49
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.

Re: JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

#50
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

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