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Agentic Development Environment by JetBrains

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Re: Agentic Development Environment by JetBrains

#51

Post by dugidugout »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #19
rileymichael wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What we want is to solve problems speak for yourself, i want to understand everything and be elbow deep in the code

I will empathize with you there. I totally want to understand everything too. I LOVE being elbow deep in code for hours on end, especially late nights, so, much, FUN!!! It is just now, I don't have to do that to actually build something meaningful, my ability to build is increased by some factor, and it is only increasing. And coding LLM's have become a great teacher for me, and I learn much faster, for when I do wan…

If you were sincere in your attempt to "empathize with [them] there", your prose screams the opposite. I point this out, as anecdotally, it was quite distracting from the rest of your point and makes me think you are not doing much to meet the other perspective.

Now to directly push on your perspective, I'm not so sure why you make the conclusion that you don't have opportunity for feedback given you've moved to a remote office culture. I am giving you a form of feedback in this instance. Yes it is at my whim and not guaranteed if our interests don't align, however this is a cost of collaboration. It is a bit grim to see the ushering of "coding LLM" as proper replacement here, when you are doing no-more than bootstrapping introspection. This isn't to detract from the value you've found in the tool, I only question why you've written off the collaboration element of unique human experiences interlocking on common ground.

Re: Agentic Development Environment by JetBrains

#53

Post by GiorgioG »

ur-whale wrote: post #52
GiorgioG wrote: post #6

Can't wait for this AI shit to be over so they can get back to their bread & butter...great dev tools.

> Can't wait for this shit to be over Said the assembly senior specialist when first confronted with this newfangled fortran compiler shit.

The Fortran compiler worked though.

Re: Agentic Development Environment by JetBrains

#54

Post by GiorgioG »

ur-whale wrote: post #52
GiorgioG wrote: post #6

Can't wait for this AI shit to be over so they can get back to their bread & butter...great dev tools.

> Can't wait for this shit to be over Said the assembly senior specialist when first confronted with this newfangled fortran compiler shit.

LLMs are nothing more than fancy weather forecasting models…they still get things wrong a lot.

Re: Agentic Development Environment by JetBrains

#55

Post by hmokiguess »

rfw300 wrote: post #11

I'd like others' input on this: increasingly, I see Cursor, Jetbrains, etc. moving towards a model of having you manage many agents working on different tasks simultaneously. But in real, production codebases, I've found that even a single agent is faster at generating code than I am at evaluating its fitness and providing design guidance. Adding more agents working on different things would not speed anything up. Bu…

I think this is the UX challenge of this era. How to design a piece of software that aids in promoting the human-level of attention to a distributed state without causing information loss or cognitive decline over many tasks. I agree that for any larger piece of work with significant scope the overhead of ingesting the context into your brain offsets the time saving costs you get from multitask promises.

My take on this is that the better these things get eventually we will be able to infer and quantify signals that provide high confidence scores for us to conduct a better review that requires a shorter decision path. This is akin to how compilers, parsers, linters, can give you some level of safety without strong guarantees but are often "good enough" to pass a smell test.

Re: Agentic Development Environment by JetBrains

#56

Post by digdugdirk »

c-linkage wrote: post #43
torben-friis wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really would like an answer to this. My CTO is currently working on the ability to run several dockerised versions of the codebase in parallel for this kind of flow. I’m here wondering how anyone could work on several tasks at once at a speed where they can read, review and iterate the output of one LLM in the time it takes for another LLM to spit an answer for a different task. Like, are we just asking things as f…

I was going to say that this is how genetic algorithms work, but there is still too much human in the loop. Maybe code husbandry?

Code Husbandry is a good term for what I've been thinking about how to implement. I hope you don't mind if I steal it. Think automated "mini agents", each with a defined set of tools and tasks, responding to specific triggers.

Imagine one agent just does docstrings - on commit, build an AST, branch, write/update comments accordingly, push and create a merge request with a standard report template.

Each of these mini-agents has a defined scope and operates in its own environment, and can be customized/trained as such. They just run continuously on the codebase based on their rules and triggers.

The idea is that all these changes bubble up to the developer for approval, just maybe after a few rounds of LLM iteration. The hope is that small models can be leveraged to a higher quality of output and operate in an asynchronous manner.

Re: Agentic Development Environment by JetBrains

#57

Post by torginus »

rfw300 wrote: post #11

I'd like others' input on this: increasingly, I see Cursor, Jetbrains, etc. moving towards a model of having you manage many agents working on different tasks simultaneously. But in real, production codebases, I've found that even a single agent is faster at generating code than I am at evaluating its fitness and providing design guidance. Adding more agents working on different things would not speed anything up. Bu…

I think the problem is that current AI models are slow to generate tpkens so the obvious solution is 'parallelism'. If they could poop out pages of code instantly, nobody would think about parallel agents.

I wish we'll get a model that's not necessarily intelligent, but at least competent at following instructions and is very fast.

I overwhelmingly prefer the workflow where I have an idea for a change and the AI implements it (or pushes back, or does it in an unexpected way) - that way I still have a general idea of what's going on with the code.

Re: Agentic Development Environment by JetBrains

#59

Post by ivape »

torben-friis wrote: post #47
ivape wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. A computer can make more code than a human can review. So, forget about the universe where you ever review code. You have to shift to almost a QA person and ignore all code and just validate the output. When it is suggested that you as a programmer will disappear, this is what they mean.

>You have to shift to almost a QA person and ignore all code and just validate the output. The obvious answer to this is that it is not feasible to retry each past validation for each new change, which is why we have testing in the first place. Then you’re back at square one because your test writing ability limits your output. Unless you plan on also vivecoding the tests and treating the whole job as a black box, in…

"... treating the whole job as a black box"

Yes, that is exactly what I mean. You ask the Wizard of Oz for something, and you hear some sounds behind the curtain, and you get something back. Validate that, and if necessary, ask Oz to try again.

"The obvious answer to this is that it is not feasible to retry each past validation for each new change"

It is reasonably feasible because the job of Production Development and QA has existed, developers just sat in the middle. Now we remove the developer, and move them over to the role of combined Product + QA, and all Product + QA was ever able to even validate was developer output (which, as far as they were ever concerned, was an actual black box since they don't know how to program).

The developer disappears when they are made to disappear or decide to disappear. If the developer begins articulating ideas in language like a product developer, and then validates like a QA engineer, then the developer has "decided" to disappear. Other developers will be told to disappear.

The existential threat to the developer is not when the company mandate comes down that you are to be a "Prompt Engineer" now, it is when the mandate comes down that you need to be a Product Designer now (as in, you mandated not to write a single. line. of. code.) . In which case vast swaths of developers will not cut it on a pure talent level.

Re: Agentic Development Environment by JetBrains

#60

Post by irilesscent »

minus7 wrote: post #36
minus7 wrote: post #35

JetBrains should stop building stupid AI shit and fix their IDEs. 2025 versions are bordering on unusable.

Issues I observed, mostly using GoLand: - syntax errors displaying persistently even after being fixed (frequently; until restarted; not seen very recently) - files/file tree not detecting changes to files on disk (frequent; until restarted; not seen very recently) - cursor teleporting to specific place on the screen when ctrl is pressed (occasionally; until restarted) - and most recently: it not accepting any mouse/…

Have you made a bug report?
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