11–20 of 87 posts
> We are now building a new product focused on agentic development This is sad. It seems innovation has all but stopped for IDEs intended for a human as the primary driver.
Moving to Apple Silicon made it bearable for a few months but somehow Jetbrains manages to get slow even on a M3 Max with 36GB RAM.
Ive been fiddling with configs for years, i tried everything since i was a Jetbrains diehard.
Instead of trying to catch up to other AI editor they should get back to their core and make it possible to use Jetbrains on medium sized Monorepos with multiple languages.
I was hyped when i heard they would release a standalone git product, but then they scrapped it!
In the end i was only dependent on it for debugging and my usual git workflow.
I now switched to zed and gitkraken, i will figure out a new debugging workflow, ill never wait 5 minutes for a simple search action again
but sigh. Jetbrains really just has no focus.
Fleet came at a time when intellij felt extremely bloated. iirc they had painted themselves into a corner where it was easier to rip the band aid and start anew.
Fleet was supposed to be that promised editor which was snappy and had the power of intellisense + all things we liked about Intellij editors ... but without the terrible glacial bloat. but in a stroke of bad luck and typical lack of focus from Jetbrains, Fleet just didn't get good enough quickly.
I say lack of focus because (like their multiple attempts at AI) Jetbrains also had a lite mode in the start but that didn't work great. then came Fleet. But it was not getting better quickly enough and they changed course to make Fleet their main cross platform editor ... but even that didn't take.
I really am worried for Jetbrains and intellij. In a world where even VScode is having its lunch eaten by Cursor, Jetbrains is quickly getting pushed out of the list of contenders. they've squandered away a lead they once had in a certain niche for code editors.
I personally only pull up Intellij these days when there's some platform specific tool that's built in (like the emulator in Android Studio) or certain Android specific profiling tools, or the debugger.
Otherwise I rarely find myself using Intellij. My usage has dropped precipitously.
Last week i cancelled my Jetbrains sub after a decade of daily driving it. I just cant take the performance issues anymore. Across 5 different machines all kinds of actions would just take ages and it got worse every year. Moving to Apple Silicon made it bearable for a few months but somehow Jetbrains manages to get slow even on a M3 Max with 36GB RAM. Ive been fiddling with configs for years, i tried everything sinc…
Alls they need to do is make extensions much much easier to build, especially extensions that render HTML. That's vscode's moat. Anytime the same extension exist in both vscode and jetbrains, the jetbrains version is clunky, crash, and unstable. I keep Jetbrains open while using vscode, for its local history/git/etc features, but how long will that be enough to keep my subscription
My problem was that Fleet just wasn't very good when compared with VSC.
For my more serious development I use JetBrains IDEs (one of the few pieces of software that I actually pay for, alongside MobaXTerm and some others) but Fleet didn't neither use that much less resources, nor was that much more responsive, nor was a step above VSC in any way. To be clear, I didn't hate it, it wasn't horrible and with a bit more work could have been quite good... just not convincingly so up until now.
If they wanted to throw some more years of engineering at it, maybe, I mean look at what Zed is doing and it seems to be okay, but I don't think it makes that much business sense for them - they already have Junie available in their editors for AI stuff and that other subscription (though I just use Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and sometimes VSC with KiloCode/RooCode/Cline and either those models through the API or Cerebras Code since it works pretty well in there).
I just find that most AI solutions out there are also a little bit half-baked, like Gemini CLI fails when I paste multiple lines into it, whereas KiloCode/RooCode/Cline are unable to give a model enough helpful instructions for it to not start looping when it fails applying a complex diff sometimes, and pretty much nothing outside of the regular GitHub Copilot plugins does autocomplete decently (especially if you want a local model with Ollama or something, no good options, Continue.dev is trash).
With how prevalent AI is and how useful various linters and build output is, sometimes I wonder whether I need to pay hundreds of euros for the Ultimate package of tools when I don't write/refactor as much code manually and doing what I need inside of VSC also feels more and more sufficient. Maybe a bit except Java codebases, Spring Boot sometimes does weird shit and you're better served by an IDE that's aware of all of the templating, annotations and other stuff.
Oh well, despite being RAM hogs, I still enjoy the experience of using JetBrains IDEs and if nothing else will keep them around for that reason for a while. A bit like how I also enjoy a GUI of some sort for Git, like previously I paid for GitKraken but reevaluating my usage found that SourceTree is also decent enough for the price (free vs GitKraken paid version), I can just drop down to the CLI for niche use cases.
Last week i cancelled my Jetbrains sub after a decade of daily driving it. I just cant take the performance issues anymore. Across 5 different machines all kinds of actions would just take ages and it got worse every year. Moving to Apple Silicon made it bearable for a few months but somehow Jetbrains manages to get slow even on a M3 Max with 36GB RAM. Ive been fiddling with configs for years, i tried everything sinc…
I thought with Kotlin they'd invest a ton of energy into Kotlin Native in order to produce fully native IDEs that can squeeze out drastically more performance, but its been over a decade of nothing happening with Kotlin that's worthwhile (despite it having had so much potential, and being a literal key language for Android ???) so I'm really kind of over JetBrains, the only thing I'll miss is DataGrip since Zed is a code editor not a DB editor. Fleet was a good idea, but poorly done, the UI was weird as hell, and it did not feel like it was as snappy as something like Zed or Sublime.
Last week i cancelled my Jetbrains sub after a decade of daily driving it. I just cant take the performance issues anymore. Across 5 different machines all kinds of actions would just take ages and it got worse every year. Moving to Apple Silicon made it bearable for a few months but somehow Jetbrains manages to get slow even on a M3 Max with 36GB RAM. Ive been fiddling with configs for years, i tried everything sinc…
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Last week i cancelled my Jetbrains sub after a decade of daily driving it. I just cant take the performance issues anymore. Across 5 different machines all kinds of actions would just take ages and it got worse every year. Moving to Apple Silicon made it bearable for a few months but somehow Jetbrains manages to get slow even on a M3 Max with 36GB RAM. Ive been fiddling with configs for years, i tried everything sinc…
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I get fast enough autocomplete (sub second), and full line completion just fine, and I never use/buy top of the line systems. (using a midrange ~2020 thinkpad).
But I'm in a similar place as the comment you replied to. Unless they start focusing again on improving they existing product line, next year I might not renew my licenses anymore.
Before AI took over, I was following closely their release notes and announcements because there where on the right path on improving experience.
What makes their IDE look bad is their indexing process, during which it is slow and completions will not show up. If you know about this quirk you know where to look for it (it's visible in the status bar), and know what triggers it (dependencies installation and such). After so many years, I really feel the solution for that is pretty "simple", "just" run the indexing on a snapshot that is not shared with the running instance and swap out indexes when done.
It would stand out if you focused on performance and not rebuilding another sluggish Java based editor. Zed is what I'll be ditching my JetBrains sub for, and it is not just some VS Code based editor. What happened to JetBrains? They used to be amazing, now its just disappointment all around? Did they elect a terrible CEO?