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No more JetBrains products for me

matthewkosarek.xyz

11–20 of 230 posts

Re: No more JetBrains products for me

#11
post #4

IDEs are dead in the age of agentic coding. Trying to find the stable point of agentic coding is like trying to catch a falling knife. Will you still need to look at diffs? I for one no longer make any edits, as a policy - I either tell the agent to fix it, or tweak a skill or memory or doc so it doesn't make the same mistake a second time, or configure something adversarial. But does that continue indefinitely?

>IDEs are dead in the age of agentic coding.

I'm glad that works for you, but you'll pry my free software from my cold dead hands. :)

Re: No more JetBrains products for me

#12
> Granted, I tend to run older hardware, but it seems that most other programs on my machine run fast and happy

Curious what hardware you’re on. I’m in the same camp with JetBrains products, performance has always been my biggest complaint. Apple M chips made a huge difference though. It’s still not my preference, but at least it’s a lot more usable now. Most of my colleagues run multiple instances daily without issues.

Re: No more JetBrains products for me

#13
I also cut off JetBrains recently after a long relationship with their tools. I agree with the points made by the author. The tools are clunky resource hogs for seemingly no reason. I was really excited when JetBrains announced Fleet and promised a lightweight UI with the old analysis engines as lighter background processes. It seemed like it would solve a lot of the problems I had with their IDEs. That never materialized though. They say that Fleet integrated into Air, but Air is not an IDE. So now we're just left with the diminishing value of their traditional IDE offering and some floundering attempts to get into the AI market. What a shame.

Re: No more JetBrains products for me

#14
> I cannot for the life of me understand why it keeps re-indexing my codebase in certain circumstances. Perhaps this is some on-again off-again bug, but it comes back to bite me constantly.

This is the thing that drives me insane. The most annoying part is that they haven't built a proper cross-idea way to diagnose this. How hard is it to just have a UI, or even some text log, that says "I'm reindexing because X, Y, Z have changed" or something?

Re: No more JetBrains products for me

#15
I had my (somewhat) breakup when they started advertising their code assistant at me. My IDE is my home. You push an advertisement at me and I get mad. I killed my subscription (with 1/2 a year left) and loaded the old version and haven't looked back. I will eventually give it up completely since new python versions aren't supported for debugging but oh well.

Re: No more JetBrains products for me

#16
post #3

As an eclipse fan, I may have experienced a teensy bit of schadenfreude while reading this.

Me too, however this is another case of exchanging IDE for text editor without understanding what is being lost, or never having used the IDE to its full potential in first place, thus not knowing what is being left behind.

Re: No more JetBrains products for me

#17
Unfortunately this is all true. I have also been using Clion to program C++ on Linux for almost a decade and the past 5 years the product has been in a free fall.

- every new release breaks something

  - the syntax highlight and auto completion engine has glaring bugs when using multiple file splits.  Bugs are open for a decade already.

  - performance is complete dog shit. Typing a characters spins up several cores at 100%. 

  - QA plays the "test the bug on the latest and report back or it doesn't exist" game. 
Overall they seem to be more interested in shuffling the UI around and adding useless AI features nobody asked for while the core product is eroding fast. It really looks like they don't have tbe engineering capacity/talent to keep the product in shape and whatever capacity they have is misspent on wrong stuff.

Sorry but Clion is over.

Re: No more JetBrains products for me

#18
post #6

Well, Zed is a text editor with some plugins, while JetBrains products are full-blown IDEs, with abilities Zed will never offer.

> while JetBrains products are full-blown IDEs, with abilities Zed will never offer.

None of those matter if they just close the IDE before it indexes.

> When all of these tiny issues come together, it makes me NOT want to program. I don’t want to sit around and wait for startup times to get my ideas onto the screen. I don’t want to worry that my CPU or RAM is going to be exhausted and I am going to have to restart my machine. I want to open my editor and immediately enter a flow state. I want the tooling to assist me when useful, and stay out of my way when not.

Re: No more JetBrains products for me

#19
post #4

IDEs are dead in the age of agentic coding. Trying to find the stable point of agentic coding is like trying to catch a falling knife. Will you still need to look at diffs? I for one no longer make any edits, as a policy - I either tell the agent to fix it, or tweak a skill or memory or doc so it doesn't make the same mistake a second time, or configure something adversarial. But does that continue indefinitely?

Agreed within the narrow confines of web dev (which is all that I do). I used to write 500-1000? LOC per day but now I've built several full fledged (250k+ arr) sites with more features than I've ever been able to implement in such a short time: all without editing a single line of code.

My guess is they are still very useful for more difficult code! But yeah, I can't imagine ever caring about "code" any more, and therefore cannot fathom the need for a full fledged IDE.

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