JetBrains cancels Fleet

I want to begin by saying I love JetBrains IDEs. I go out of my way to personally pay for PyCharm Professional, DataGrip, Rider, and others, and have done so for years, so I can use it at work where the next best thing provided to us is VS Code, or Visual Studio...

Please, for the love of all things almighty, re-invest in your core IDEs. That's what you're known for, and that's what professional developers want.

I don't want a glorified text editor that does a few cheap tricks, and is 'AI first'. I know I'm going to piss off a few people here rubbishing VS Code, however people are blown away when I show them how much more powerful PyCharm is when debugging complex code.

Its embarrassing that there are many popular, numerously starred, issues across JetBrains' YouTrack that have been open for nearly a decade, that are already well integrated features in other, free, IDEs.

However all is not lost - you have a great suite of products that need much more tender love and care. They'll see you through.

You already have AI in the AI Assistant plugin. Make your core fleet of IDEs worth the investment, for new and existing JetBrains customers alike. AI, agentic or not, will only get programmers so far before it's time to toss the kids toys then break out the real tools that require human intuition, domain knowledge, and reasoning.

To pick up on one of the points in the article:

> Combining them in a single tool results in a disjointed experience, so the Fleet team chose to stop competing with IDEs and code editors and instead build a product focused on agentic workflows. This led to a pivot to a new product: an agentic development environment.

You don't need to develop an entire IDE/environment for this. Develop plugins/enhance the existing AI Assistant plugin for these workflows that integrate with your existing IDEs, 'the real tools' I was talking about above.

I feel like this new "agentic development environment" is making the Fleet mistake all over again, when you could be value-adding to your already great suite of IDEs directly by way of plugins, and also continue to refactor and improve your IDEs along the way.

I've been using Firefox and Jetbrains for about a decade. Firefox is currently using 0.8% CPU while streaming music in another tab. The only speed difference between it and Chrome is that Chrome will prefetch pages in the background, which appears to make it faster on clicks. However, even were it much slower than Chromium alternatives, I would never give up my fully functioning uBlock Origin.

But anyway, in regards to Jetbrains, its performance certainly seems to be degrading over time. I'll try to explain why I still use it. First of all there is high friction to change IDEs when I have memorized every shortcut and configured every panel to my liking. I have within my IDE the terminal, the DB viewer and query executor, the debugger, the profiler, HTTP client, LLM chat, etc. Configuring all of this elsewhere would be a large pain in the ass, especially when switching computers/jobs.

More sticky still is the functionality. I've unfortunately become reliant upon, or perhaps fortunately been able to learn, the advanced features of the thing. Advanced refactoring tools that I trust to work without review, because they do. Quick shortcuts to insert large chunks of custom boilerplate. Perfect inference of method definitions/sources (try this in a Rails codebase in VSCode; it doesn't work). Other such things that I take for granted but that probably aren't in the competitors.

It might be possible to replicate this functionality with about thirty plugins from random authors in vim/VSC, but I'd rather just pay my yearly license fee and get good working software. Yes, it takes a couple of seconds to do certain things, but it saves me a lot more time than that.

"Banks are full of war stories trying to migrate off their old mainframe codebases, and often giving up."

Most of the time it's a question of trying to apply "death by a thousand cuts" to their codebase, which works well enough as long as you're in the periphery, but eventually they start moving into "core business", you know that entangled mess that has 60 years old code that still runs today, and they realize they need to rewrite all of it, which will take a long time, and cost a lot of money, and they forget about it again for a few years.

It's the same problem everywhere with large and old codebases. You can easily amputate a tentacle here and there, but as soon as you get to the core of it, it is basically one giant monolith, and with age there has been added loads of "integrations" or "shortcuts" between various subsystems, and nobody in the company today has any idea why it is like it is, it just is and it works.

A bank I used to work for had somewhere around 50000 batch programs running nightly. Some were the same program running multiple times, but at least 20000 were "unique" programs. All of those programs had to fit like pearls on a string, each working off of the output of the previous program in the chain.

Untangling that mess is like peeling an onion one layer at a time, with the added bonus that the output of one program might be the final result for some report, and at the same time the input for some other program that needs to do something else.

Add to that, that there's no inherent problem with the mainframe or COBOL. They both work, and reliably as well. Both can push some serious IO through the system, loads that many x86/x64 builds would struggle with.

The conventional answer to IO problems is eventual consistency, which doesn't really work well with finance, at least not if applied broadly. You can get some of the way with slicing / partitioning, but you will still have to deal with a lot of traffic between partitions.

Open source it & let community take over?

> Last week i cancelled my Jetbrains sub after a decade of daily driving it.

I’ve been paying for a personal license for about 20 years and I’ve been thinking of dropping it. I don’t use it much, but I wanted access to something that I could use offline. I’m not sure that’s possible at this point, so the main appeal is kind of gone for me.

I frequently choose “lesser” tools if it means I’m guaranteed they’ll run offline. I’ve always wanted to have a dev container with all the tools needed to develop 100% offline if needed. Licensing makes that almost impossible and Jetbrains doesn’t look like they have any solutions that work great for 100% offline development anymore.

I might check out Zed this week. I’ve never heard of it. If anyone has some great resources for 100% offline development, I’d love to see them. My subscriptions are getting out of hand and this may be the year for me to trim the fat.