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JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

youtrack.jetbrains.com

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Re: JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

#51

Post by PreInternet01 »

ilc wrote: post #45
PreInternet01 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a minor bug at most? And if the plugin remains enabled, but doesn't do anything, what's the actual issue here? Rephrased: what's the problem with waiting until the next point release of the affected product before assuming malicious intent?

Because the whole way they've handled this situation reeks. Oh, we'll get you on a wait list. Bullshit. Waitlist never came in. It's OK to say the waitlist closed. Keeping people hopeful is a shitty move. Then to pull this on launch... (sigh) I didn't want to have to waste time on this shit. I'll go back to VSCode, neovim or whatever if I must. I'm more frustrated with myself that I trusted them to provide me a year+…

Believe it or not, but I lived through the whole broken experience of AI previews in JetBrains products by... just ignoring the whole thing.

Sure, I got "sign up now!!!" buttons that did nothing for me. I learned after, like, the first 3 times of clicking these not to do that again.

Then, I was, at some point, able to sign up for the preview. It was underwhelming. Like most other offerings in this space.

Meanwhile, all the core IDE functionality continued working as before... And all was good...

Re: JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

#52

Post by llm_nerd »

To clarify submission-

-if you disable the plugin, it will be enabled when you restart.

-if you uninstall the plugin, on restart an old version will appear, enabled, in its place, begging for an update.

However given that JetBrains didn't block either uninstall or disable, the most logical explanation is that this is a bug/unintentional. The rollout of this AI plugin has been really poorly done, with it completely failing to function on the first iteration. You couldn't even login or activate.

Hanlon's razor applies. JetBrains has too good of corporate behaviours to be trying to fool people in this case, and the surrounding evidence all points to a bug.

Re: JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

#53

Post by mattgreenrocks »

myaccountonhn wrote: post #50
echelon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a cynical take. JetBrains knows what's best for its business. It knows that Microsoft presents a clear and present danger to extincting them and all of their hard work. LLMs have a huge role in the future of engineering, whether or not you like it. They present massive productivity boosts. I'm a senior Rust engineer and I've seen my development time nearly cut in half after using LLMs. And we're just getting…

I still have no idea how people get so productive with the use of LLMs. I've had it maybe cut out some boilerplate for me occasionally but that's about it. So many times the solutions are wrong or poorly written. It's not useless, but it has certainly not been a 2x improvement.

It probably comes down to what your practice of programming is.

If it's "search for code snippets that might do what you want, copy/paste, change and adapt until it mostly works," then, yeah, LLMs are going to be a huge time saver.

If it's "sit there and think about what you need to do, then write and debug it," then LLMs aren't quite a force-multiplier. Honestly, good auto-complete and decent software architecture are probably at least as effective as an LLM when it comes to composing code.

Over-simplifying here, but you get my gist. The latter method still benefits hugely from LLMs when it comes to boilerplate code. And there's still a lot of boilerplate code in programming! Today I was asking ChatGPT if it could scrape info out of HTML, and it autonomously wrote a Python script to do it for me when I asked to work on a larger chunk of data.

Re: JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

#54

Post by simion314 »

llm_nerd wrote: post #52

To clarify submission- -if you disable the plugin, it will be enabled when you restart. -if you uninstall the plugin, on restart an old version will appear, enabled, in its place, begging for an update. However given that JetBrains didn't block either uninstall or disable, the most logical explanation is that this is a bug/unintentional. The rollout of this AI plugin has been really poorly done, with it completely fa…

> if you disable the plugin, it will be enabled when you restart.

Must be bug or misunderstanding , I disabled it last week and it stayed off, the ticket complains that the plugin can't be wiped but this is not the only plugin that works like that.

Re: JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

#55

Post by matrix87 »

echelon wrote: post #44
trmpakufnfee wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what every company is doing in the name of integrating "Gen AI". 90% of it is chat bots. And in 90% of those places I dont want a chat bot.

This is a cynical take. JetBrains knows what's best for its business. It knows that Microsoft presents a clear and present danger to extincting them and all of their hard work. LLMs have a huge role in the future of engineering, whether or not you like it. They present massive productivity boosts. I'm a senior Rust engineer and I've seen my development time nearly cut in half after using LLMs. And we're just getting…

This is just a sample size of n=1.

I personally don't use these but worked with a guy who leaned heavily on LLMs for a group project. He was really good at quickly shitting out boilerplate but couldn't actually explain any of it or understand the spec in the documents

Imo, the consequences of letting people who suck appear to be doing stuff is more severe than a 50% productivity boost for others. I would rather work somewhere that bans using them outright after this experience. There's my n=1 for anyone interested

Re: JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

#56

Post by ivanmontillam »

To quote myself in the YouTrack thread.

> This is excess hubris from a Product Manager who decided it was a good idea to force a plugin on users. This is hostile behaviour. I bet the conversation went like this: "Yeah, they'll learn to love it; it's soooo great what we have to offer with this cutting-edge technology!"

I really do hope they reconsider this Product choice.

> I reckon they need to recoup the investment of running AI servers; I know it's crazy expensive, but JetBrains, this is not the way.

I bet because of the investor pressure, they had no choice but to jump on the AI bandwagon this way. Between the sword and the wall, CoPilot is going to eat their bacon.

Re: JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

#57

Post by echelon »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #53
myaccountonhn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have no idea how people get so productive with the use of LLMs. I've had it maybe cut out some boilerplate for me occasionally but that's about it. So many times the solutions are wrong or poorly written. It's not useless, but it has certainly not been a 2x improvement.

It probably comes down to what your practice of programming is. If it's "search for code snippets that might do what you want, copy/paste, change and adapt until it mostly works," then, yeah, LLMs are going to be a huge time saver. If it's "sit there and think about what you need to do, then write and debug it," then LLMs aren't quite a force-multiplier. Honestly, good auto-complete and decent software architecture a…

I'm in the middle of a massive migration. Tables, joins, APIs, and lots of plumbing are changing. (Ordinarily we'd sequence this into phases, but we're moving fast.)

I got a 3,000 line change in yesterday without getting bored. All while I'm also juggling a ton of other responsibilities.

Tab, yep that's right. Tab, yep, tab yep. Tab, yep.

This tech makes a huge difference. It even helped write the tests.

I'm not being lazy. I'm a recent convert.

Moreover, two of my colleagues are entirely new to Rust, and the time at which they've both been able to learn not only the language fundamentals but the codebase astounds me. They're of course reading all they can, but this tooling makes for one of the best tutors.

Re: JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

#58

Post by echelon »

matrix87 wrote: post #55
echelon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a cynical take. JetBrains knows what's best for its business. It knows that Microsoft presents a clear and present danger to extincting them and all of their hard work. LLMs have a huge role in the future of engineering, whether or not you like it. They present massive productivity boosts. I'm a senior Rust engineer and I've seen my development time nearly cut in half after using LLMs. And we're just getting…

This is just a sample size of n=1. I personally don't use these but worked with a guy who leaned heavily on LLMs for a group project. He was really good at quickly shitting out boilerplate but couldn't actually explain any of it or understand the spec in the documents Imo, the consequences of letting people who suck appear to be doing stuff is more severe than a 50% productivity boost for others. I would rather work…

To be fair, I think there are tens of thousands (or more) people saying these things.

I just posted an anecdote down thread of how it's empowering our senior engineers.

Re: JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

#59

Post by drpossum »

Scarbutt wrote: post #12

Many plugins can't be completely removed but you can disabled them, was wrong with that? I disabled this one and it hasn't nag me.

AI plugins that analyze and ship your code off need to be able to set more important boundaries by their very nature for many environments, to say nothing of normal privacy expectations.

Re: JetBrains forces AI freemium plugin that cannot be completely removed into IDEs

#60

Post by ta1243 »

happytiger wrote: post #19

Oh how the might have fallen. For many years they were the one company that understood developer trust and kept that faith. I’ve seen developers argue for literally months in big companies to get this tooling to be the default and get paid for. I don’t know who needs to be fired over there, but whoever made this decision needs to be and the company needs to make a public apology and public commitment to remove nag fr…

They're leaving money on the table by not further monetising their users.

Modern capitalism is not about making a product and selling it for a fair price. It's about extracting every last cent by selling your users to other people. Double Dipping is the motto.

The only problem with this is they aren't inserting adverts into you IDE, or indeed why not put adverts in the code you write.

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