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JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

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Re: JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

#21

Post by Timon3 »

pandemic_region wrote: post #4

The whole Jetbrains product suite is sliding downhill quality wise. Can we go back to the days of yore where it was just a lightning fast Java code editor and it did that extremely well?

This has also been my experience. Every update brings new weird bugs that disrupt my workflow - it's gotten bad enough that I've stopped updating their tools when the bugs aren't in main parts of my workflow, because while updates may fix those, they are sure to introduce even worse ones. And it's not like I'm doing crazy stuff, for a while even copying text made a "Copying..." dialog pop up and freeze the editor for a while.

Unless something drastically changes, I won't be renewing my license anymore. I don't like VS Code, but it's been much more reliable than the Jetbrains tools I use.

Re: JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

#22

Post by lolinder »

ziddoap wrote: post #5

> a JetBrains employee said that reviews were removed because they mentioned issues that had since been solved That shouldn't be considered a valid reason to remove a review. I could maybe understand down-weighting reviews as they age and as issues are resolved, but as a potential buyer of some product/service/whatever, knowing that something was released with a bunch of issues (even if now solved) is a valuable sign…

Yes, it's a terrible excuse, and it's concerning that they think it's a good one. I highly doubt that they make a habit of fielding requests from plugin authors to nuke outdated reviews: you simply can't scale the verification that would require to do honestly. If they don't offer this as an option to others then this move is wrong both for the reasons you give and because they're claiming a privilege in their app store that they won't afford to their competition.

Re: JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

#23

Post by throwuxiytayq »

pandemic_region wrote: post #4

The whole Jetbrains product suite is sliding downhill quality wise. Can we go back to the days of yore where it was just a lightning fast Java code editor and it did that extremely well?

Any specific reason you’d say that? I’ve been using Rider for years it has been strictly getting better with each version.

(Please don’t disappoint me by saying “they added an optional feature and I don’t like it”)

Re: JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

#24

Post by serial_dev »

ziddoap wrote: post #5

> a JetBrains employee said that reviews were removed because they mentioned issues that had since been solved That shouldn't be considered a valid reason to remove a review. I could maybe understand down-weighting reviews as they age and as issues are resolved, but as a potential buyer of some product/service/whatever, knowing that something was released with a bunch of issues (even if now solved) is a valuable sign…

I wonder if they remove reviews that complain about bugs that were resolved (at least according to the plugin author) for all other plugins that aren’t theirs… Do they? … yeah I thought so.

Re: JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

#25

Post by Thaxll »

pandemic_region wrote: post #4

The whole Jetbrains product suite is sliding downhill quality wise. Can we go back to the days of yore where it was just a lightning fast Java code editor and it did that extremely well?

Being fast is not enough in 2025.

Re: JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

#26

Post by buybackoff »

I'm really concerned over the last couple of years that my two paid subscriptions (work/personal) go into AI BS development I do not need, instead of fixing pain points I have daily. It may continue for so long. I hope to see they defend the removal of AI assistant completely, by moving it completely off the main channel. They are not MSFT that can waste a billion here and there. Every AI feature they make is paid by existing users.

Re: JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

#27

Post by bb88 »

roegerle wrote: post #15
zer0-c00l wrote: post #11

I love JetBrains and hate vscode, but Cursor was such a huge productivity boost that I ended up switching. Unfortunately none of the JetBrains plugins (Junie, the older AI Assistant, Windsurf/codeium, etc) come close yet :(

The subscription costs are worth it?

Depends mostly upon what you're doing.

Having done go and python in jetbrains and vscode, I definitely enjoy the experience in jetbrains more. A lot of java people like IntelliJ for their Java and Kotlin support.

OTOH, copilot has been not as good on Jetbrains as it has been on vscode. Updates are delayed to give VSCode a first mover advantage to VSCode.

Google Gemini Code assist plugin last week still sucked, didn't try it today.

Copilot can also use Gemini Pro 2.5, but they delayed the release of the plugin for Jetbrains, and only have a context of 10 files I believe for the edit mode.

And I thought I read somewhere that Jetbrains AI Assistant can use gemini AI pro, it's limited to a context window of 200,000. I might be wrong on that.

Junie is reasonably good, but still has issues with understanding large code blocks of more than a couple of kilobytes. But it applies the changes first, without letting you do a review of the code. The only real way to do it, is to check in the code in git, then let it run, and then look at the results.

I've asked Junie to fix unit tests using brave mode, and it seems more than capable with that.

I think the trick with Junie is small defined tasks, rather than large bullet points. Or at least have a detailed plan which you can paste in, and reasonably detailed so it won't have to guess or infer what it is you want.

But generally speaking, I've had far better luck with Google Gemini Pro 2.5 on code generation than with some of the others lately.

Edited to add: Github Copilot added agent mode. I'm going to try it now.

Re: JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

#28

Post by switch007 »

pandemic_region wrote: post #4

The whole Jetbrains product suite is sliding downhill quality wise. Can we go back to the days of yore where it was just a lightning fast Java code editor and it did that extremely well?

It really has. I had to disable the GitHub plugin to get rid of a PR comment box that wouldn't disappear.

Junit test runs say No tests available about 50% of the time

It feels slower and slower

Today I started getting "unable to save settings" or something, no idea what that is about

It really shows that they're distracted from quality. My guess is with the breadth of features and quite amazing attention to detail, they needed 100% dedication to those efforts, and now a chunk of the company is doing something else, and now the product is falling apart

But hey we have a totally new console engine or something so that's really nice (I've personally never used the console ...)

Re: JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

#29

Post by serial_dev »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #3

Not a good look. A better way would’ve been to add a response to the reviews (and notify the reviewers via eg email): “Hi, we’ve updated and these issues should be addressed now. Please take a look and let us know what you think!”

But that would be a lot of work and the damned user could reply or update their review that “it still doesn’t work and my review still stands”.

If you control both the product and the platform, deleting negative reviews is much more convenient than actually resolving the issues.

Re: JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

#30

Post by ianlevesque »

nicolaslem wrote: post #13
chuckadams wrote: post #8

Junie is a much better agent than the AI Assistant and uses the same AI subscription plan, but Augment blows the doors off both of them.

I never managed to get anything out of Junie. Each of my queries end up with an internal process stuck on a loop eating 100% CPU until I kill it. Back to Windsurf for now which is disappointing because I much prefer PyCharm for everything else.

Results quality is probably language-dependent. I was able to use Junie to do a bunch of Java/Kotlin tasks and it worked very well.
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