I had to scroll halfway through the article to get to the real details:
> "Although the AI Assistant plugin is bundled, and the plugin itself is enabled, there is no AI functionality enabled by default, and no data is sent off-machine without your consent," said Ellis, echoing similar replies posted to some of the discussion threads. "You have to log in, accept the data policies and either purchase a subscription or start a trial."
> There is no AI functionality enabled by default, and no data is sent off-machine without your consent
> "Any data sent to the AI service is not used for training.
So many (maybe most) of the comments on HN don’t reflect the actual situation:
- AI is not enabled by default
- Code is not ingested for training purposes
- You have to either sign up for a trial or purchase a subscription
- You would have to explicitly accept the data policy to even begin using it
So the real complaint of these people is that the plugin simply exists by default, which apparently is enough to get the product banned from certain companies.
All of the comments speculating about it collecting your code for their training purposes or doing 3rd party AI things without your consent, or being enabled without any warning are easily disproven by a quick read of the article. It’s getting hard to read HN comments about anything AI related with all of these comments substituting their own assumptions and assuming the worst case scenario without any effort to read the article.
>"You have to log in, accept the data policies and either purchase a subscription or start a trial."
TBH I'm most frustrated by a product I already paying a subscription to use having a "wink wink nudge nudge" plugin thrown in by default to lure me into a second subscription.
I thought I paid for the IDE precisely to prevent such nickle and diming? If I wanted CI/CD or memory profilers or whatnot I'll find them myself, I don't need to have some menu context option that turns out to not actually be on my machine.
>All of the comments speculating about it collecting your code for their training purposes or doing 3rd party AI things without your consent, or being enabled without any warning are easily disproven by a quick read of the article.
Well that's what happens when some mysterious new plugin finds itself on your dev tools without much acknoledgement. See Notepad++ for a similar controvery for a much more tame update. These aren't casual users who just can't or don't notice such subtle changes to websites.
That said, I do remember some AI update in some notes when I upgraded Rider. I thought it was just some under the hood code completion experiments, but I wasn't expecting it to ultimately install a trial to yet another $10/month service on there.
You do not have to pay for a subscription for their IDEs. You can pay just once and get that version of the IDE forever plus a period of updates. Or, use the community edition and pay nothing.
The "AI" service consumes real resources - it is not free for them to operate, and is a new cost burden that cannot be absorbed by the existing pricing. It makes complete sense for it to be its own cost.
You can also use the offline-only mode, which is 100% free and just runs on your machine.
I hate the "everything as a subscription" model with a passion, but JetBrains is one company that does appear to do it the "right" way where you're paying for continued development, not continued access to the same version.
> Well that's what happens when some mysterious new plugin finds itself on your dev tools without much acknoledgement
It was in the changenotes with a huge section, it was in the newsletter, and the blog.
JetBrains releases a lot of features of plugins, as they always have, so you can choose to slim down the IDE or replace functionality with 3rd party stuff (like copilot).
> The "AI" service consumes real resources - it is not free for them to operate, and is a new cost burden that cannot be absorbed by the existing pricing. It makes complete sense for it to be its own cost.
Sure is costs money to operate, most thing do. But that's not a good reason to have what is effectively an ad in a paid ide, plus a plugin that's effectivity dead code installed by default
>You can pay just once and get that version of the IDE forever plus a period of updates. Or, use the community edition and pay nothing.
nit: there is no community edition of Rider as of now (nor CLion from what I saw a few years ago. Could have changed). But yes, that is one thing I do like about Jetbrains.
But as of now I am paying a subscription price and I'm sure if I was on an older version this would want me to update. So now we have 2 subscriptions.
>The "AI" service consumes real resources - it is not free for them to operate, and is a new cost burden that cannot be absorbed by the existing pricing. It makes complete sense for it to be its own cost
sure, I don't care about it being free or paid. I pay for Dotcover as well so I'm not opposed to other paid tools if I find them useful.
I just don't want there to be some constant ploy of "oh you want to use a proile command in the top level menu? You haven't paid yet! Would you like to extend your subscription?" That's an annoying sales pitch. If I don't have a profiler don't put it front in center as if I do.
>JetBrains releases a lot of features of plugins, as they always have,
indeed. Most aren't installed by default, and I don't think any of them have ever retroactively installed in an update.
> indeed. Most aren't installed by default, and I don't think any of them have ever retroactively installed in an update.
They do, constantly. It's how their IDEs have always been structured for features. The current version of PyCharm comes with _76_ plugins, and new bundled plugins are added with practically every release.
> nit: there is no community edition of Rider as of now (nor CLion from what I saw a few years ago. Could have changed)
There's also a small but noticeable trend of them taking over actual for real Open Source plugins and bringing them in-house, as with the Terraform and Rust plugins. I am not only complaining about the closed-sourcing of them, which offends me as a hacker, but also because (at least with the Terraform one) it also became feature-dead, too, which I associate with all closed-source code having to compete with other backlog and corporate pressure for eyeballs
It could be apples-and-oranges because the rust one is getting promoted into its own IDE but still not a good trend
>TBH I'm most frustrated by a product I already paying a subscription to use having a "wink wink nudge nudge" plugin thrown in by default to lure me into a second subscription.
>I thought I paid for the IDE precisely to prevent such nickle and diming? If I wanted CI/CD or memory profilers or whatnot I'll find them myself, I don't need to have some menu context option that turns out to not actually be on my machine.
Relatable. However, there's also Qodana plugin in the default installation of PyCharm that nudges you, and people don't seem to complain much about that.
"are easily disproven by a quick read of the article". Some people don't have the room to trust that it will always and flawless not do those things from their security needs. You're right most people don't care and probably won't be affected, but the "probably" is not acceptable for everyone.
It didn't need to be bundled and Jetbrains had to provide awkward "delete these files on your system" for the people who genuinely couldn't live with the situation because the uninstall part was bugged.
On the other hand, how is the AI plugin different from any other web connected plugin / service in the IDE? Some of this has to come down to being realistic about the choice you made when you bought into a proprietary (even if very well polished and highly useful) software. Either you trust that their software isn't arbitrarily sending your private code and information off or you don't. If you don't, you either firewall the app from outgoing connections or you don't use the app at all. Either way I don't see why the addition of a new feature and service suddenly changes how likely you think they are to be sending off your private code.
Because other plugins don't have "sending code to third-party AI service" as their actual, advertised feature. This one does. And the "sending code to third-party AI service" part is something of a hot topic in enterprise these days, across many organizational levels.
Honestly, I'm more worried about malice from plugins that aren't specifically intended to send my source off-site.
The purpose of this plugin is to allow you to pay for a service. It's not sending anything anywhere without a subscription. Any other plugin could be malicious and would you ever notice if it started sending your code to an arbitrary third-party?
AI is a hot topic, sure, and it's more likely that someone would want to send confidential code to an AI service than to (say) me, but at the end of the day the underlying policy should be the same: don't send confidential data to a third party without going through the necessary processes.
> All of the comments speculating about it collecting your code for their training purposes or doing 3rd party AI things without your consent, or being enabled without any warning are easily disproven by a quick read of the article.
Because we can trust what corporations say, right?
Nothing has been disproven. And yes, the sole existence of the plugin is enough for IT departments to flag the entire IDE.
It was also not taken positively that Jetbrains decided to auto-deploy the plugin on installations of IDEs. Also, the plugin re-enabled itself after every update. This added to the paranoia in regards to the first point.
This plugin is 'bundled' which means it can't be uninstalled. There are examples of widely used plugins supported by JetBrains that are not bundled, for example IdeaVim. They could suggest installing AI plugin as part of install/upgrade process, but not bundle it, like they do for IdeaVim. In that case everyone would be happy.
Cheap phones lack storage space.
Disabling the plugin does not really inconvenience you in any real way besides annoying you with the fact that it’s there
> So the real complaint of these people is that the plugin simply exists by default, which apparently is enough to get the product banned from certain companies.
Yup, because "installed/not installed" is something companies know how to handle - whether by policy, or by restrictions set by IT. "Installed and enabled/not enabled" is something they're not suited to handle - activation can happen due to misguided user action, or even software update. AI space is still very much unclear wrt. risk/liability, so you can understand corporate being uneasy about it.
Or in more general sense: there's a huge jump between "not existing" and "existing", much greater than between "existing but inert" and "existing and active". Think e.g. about security vulnerabilities: there's a difference between one being unexploited (yet), and it just not being there in the first place.
You’re right but also keep in mind that company policies are often made without much thought. I can totally see a BigCorp making a policy that no AI clients are to be installed on their machines, regardless if the functionality is turned off
You're right but also keep in mind that companies do make decisions like that with thought or are contractually bound by the work they do for this, e.g. defense work, proprietary secrets that if they got out would far exceed the cost of the requirements
> It’s getting hard to read HN comments about anything AI related with all of these comments substituting their own assumptions and assuming the worst case scenario without any effort to read the article
Maybe there’s a reason for this beyond bias?
I mean, HN is a reasonable forum. It’s got a pretty good set of moderation standards. The folk here aren’t particularly prone to take sides blindly without thought or reason.
If you seeing this (and I’m not, particularly, but let’s pretend for a moment you are); maybe AI has an image problem.
Maybe? I mean, what are you looking for? What more from a community like this would you like to see?
Here’s my $0.02:
I use jetbrains products all the time.
I read the article.
I am not anti-AI.
I’m still uncomfortable with it; because today when I was using rider, I got a feedback pop up saying “how would you rate this AI completion?” from a normal completion.
I don’t have assistant enabled. I’ve never used it. I haven’t signed up for it. I’m not using an EAP.
It was probably just a screw up of some kind.
…but, when you deeply integrate this stuff into the platform, that’s what you get; you cant tell when it’s active or not.
It should be a plug-in.
I don’t like it when, for whatever technical reason, I’m forced to use an AI product, when I didn’t opt into using it, and I’m not satisfied, based on my personal experience that they’re doing this right.
Maybe anti AI sentiment you see is more considered, in some cases, than you believe.
>If you seeing this (and I’m not, particularly, but let’s pretend for a moment you are); maybe AI has an image problem.
Clearly. Look at the players and where the money is, and look at how those players were doing with other tech last decade. No surprise that their goodwill from the get go is not only drained but in debt. Even before going into the actual ethical and logistical quandaries of AI, I was already skewed to be skeptical.
So it is a shame when you see similar mannerisms dropping from companies you did trust. again, even without considering the idea of AI: the company provided a required update that added a new plugin in by default, which leads me to another subscription. This is how the nickel-and-diming starts.
>I’m still uncomfortable with it; because today when I was using rider, I got a feedback pop up saying “how would you rate this AI completion?” from a normal completion.
Quite honestly if I got a popup like that from any text editor I would never use it again.
They have added a small local-only model that runs directly on your machine to try and do smarter autocompletion. The model only runs if your machine is considered powerful enough to provide a sensibly fast experience. Nothing ever leaves your computer. I was equally confused, then I found all these details somewhere in their documentation.
It's a safe space for people with money to express opinions that would otherwise get them excoriated.
In many ways it's the online version of the upper class insisting that the silverware must be arranged in a certain way and used only on specific types of food with specific ways of holding them.
It's mostly fake and one of the ways you can see this is the sheer amount of passive aggressive behavior witnessed.
as it always goes article coming out in 4-6 months … “due to a bug introduced in version x…x…x we have found that we DID enabled AI by default and that we DID ingest every line of code from every project world-wide and that you DID NOT have to subscribe or sign-up for training for this to happen and that it DID happen without your consent. Our bad…
I hate that it has happened before and that it very likely will happen again. I just hope Jetbrains isn't a future example.
"it" being a more general "boiling frog" patter in tech on how companies started with humble pricings or offerings, but inevtiable try to rent seek more and more. Everything changed to subscription only, or subscriptions started adding ads anyway with you paying even more money for what you had before. I just hate how backhanded so much of it is; if you need to increases prices, increase them. dont't be passive aggressive.
I guess people are calling it "enshittificaion", but it's a crude word I don't particularly care for.
I use Goland. The article says the plugin is not "enabled by default", but that's only because its functionality is locked behind a subscription. The plugin is enabled by default, I have to manually go into the settings to disable it so that I stop receiving notifications about having to update the plugin (which I'm not even using since I don't have a subscription). Jetbrains has documentation showing how to disable it [1]. It was enabled by default.
Frankly I didn't expect this kind of scummy behaviour from Jetbrains (installing unremovable, subscription-only plugins that are enabled by default). It's 100% a push to forcibly increase the usage of their AI assistant.
The problem is we've all seen this pattern before.
Push the disabled by default, opt-in only version. Face only small backlash because it's opt-in. Then in a later update, switch it to on by default but with an easy opt-out. Then make the opt-out harder or disable other functionality unless users opt-in.
This general pattern happens for all sorts of privacy-invading data collection, advertisements, etc. Companies release a good product, then the enshittification slowly happens over multiple updates, each of which is only a small enough step to not cause too much outrage, until the end product is completely user-hostile.
Amazon Prime and any other service that went from "free with ads" and "paid ad-free" to adding a "paid with ads" and "pay even more to remove the ads you used to have removed".
This includes Windows as a whole. It's almost incredible how many different settings you have to dig into to get most of them out.
having recently re-installed Jetbrains Rider, not once did I ever get the impression that the AI portion was unable to be opted out of. It was one of the first things I do (I also disable source control plugins).
Agreed that's false outcry.
It is annoying because of its updates and the fact that it shows prominently in the UI at first start. But that pretty much all unless you activate it which I tested when it was in beta and require indeed that you agree to those agreements and log in.
Agreed. I really don’t understand how upset people are. Do you think they want to give you a free AI service? From a business perspective, AI is an opportunity for a brand new revenue stream. It’s certainly not free for the company to develop and operate either.
Clearly, JetBrains wasn’t foolish enough to secretly send your data to their servers either. If they ever do in the future, bring out all the pitch forks. Until then, it seems like people are just scrambling for something to be upset about for no reason other than it’s something they can discuss on HN.
What baffles me most is that JetBrains didn't realise AI integration makes their product unusable in many companies, that it's more than a matter of personal preference. It's one thing to create a plugin, but deeply integrating it to a point it can't be removed when corps like Amazon prohibit the use of Copilot betrays a total lack of foresight.
Before the new year, some executives made it known they wanted a chatgpt like interface to answer questions about a service. Current page gets less than a thousand visits a month. Current page has a list of answers on one page, and costs a few cents to run. Executives want AI everywhere to the point of fiduciary irresponsibility.
My poorly made point being: executives have been driven insane by AI/ML hype.
Executives, senior leadership, middle management trying to please leadership, engineers trying to get promoted... everyone has been whipped into a frenzy.
I sat through a two day (all day) "retreat" (conference room in our regular office) where people tripped over themselves to present their teams innovative AI ideas to leadership.
"It's a chat bot that..."
"It's a chat bot that..."
"It's a chat bot that..."
A shame, I went into tech to escape all these fleeting fads. But ofc I end up taking Computer Science in college right when Tech is blowing up (I really just looked at STEM fields and picked the best engineering I saw in each college. I coulda easily been a mechanical or electrical engineer if I wasn't accepted at the school I went to) so I end up seeing all sorts of booms and busts. mobile, cloud, data science, ML. Now AI.
I just wanna make pretty graphics go fast. I don't need to turn everything into a cloud based app with an LLM attached to it.
Meanwhile, I'm over at a company where one of our most important products is literally a white-label-able chatbot, and we are very careful to corral any "AI" off into specific controllable parts.
This is partly because it needs to output reliable well-structured data for downstream integrations.
> At least if they either use the user's code in training
JetBrains makes it clear that the code is not submitted for training purposes, contrary to the speculation in a lot of comments.
It’s also not enabled by default and requires a trial or subscription as well, so it’s not something people are going to stumble into accidentally using.
I’m sure some strict companies will forbid the use of any product that might possibly have an AI component, but they’ll be refining policies and making exceptions as everything from operating systems to web browsers start coming with optional AI features.
Boggles my mind that they lacked the foresight to seriously consider whether this was a good move or not. I always considered them extremely developer friendly, but with this latest move, I'm not so sure.
I wouldnt just write them off for one goof. It can happen to anyone. In the grand scheme of things this is a new market that is growing and adapting accordingly.
I have a feeling that's one of their goals, if you watch the launch video you can see they're really trying to make their offering as flexible as possible.
The messianic fervor AI proponents have been spewing these past few months are blinding even people we’d deem reasonable in the past.
People are now in the phase of “if there’s no AI we’ll die” of their products so we should expect it will get much worse before it gets better. I’m now mostly turned off whenever I see a company saying they’re adding “more AI” to their products as that usually means the experience is about to get worse.
Also, imo, a lot of companies greatly underestimate the real runtime cost of AI.
You can’t just throw AI into your existing product and hope that it will fly. Even the most impressive implementations will hit the hard wall of money. Adding AI to an existing product is far from free and you’ll probably need to upgrade your Pricing pages if you add AI to your core offer.
Heck, even OpenAI is currently having a hard time making ChatGPT+ profitable even though they are pricing it at $25 a month. So imagine all those companies hoping they could easily add "ChatGPT" to their $9.99/m business.
I think there is a reason we still don’t see Siri or Alexa powered by GPT while everyone is hoping it’ll happen : Siri & Alexa have always been designed to be cheap and they still dont know how they will sell you the $30/month Alexa Prime.
While I don’t think it’s problematic for OpenAI as they have infinite money to scale but the Jetbrains solution is so behind copilot I don’t even understand why they bothered pushing it.
> OpenAI is currently having a hard time making ChatGPT+ profitable
If they made a profit right now, all investors would hit the ceiling and tell them to stop doing such insane things. In the current stage they're supposed to grow and take over the market (and build a "platform"), not make profits...
Given that a huge percentage of code is written via JetBrains IDEs, couldn't this be a scheme on their part to gather source code training data on a similar scale as github is doing with copilot?
Yeah and has this actually been audited? Tech companies routinely lie about data collection. What's more likely, JetBrains decided that 1 year old LLMs are so foundational a technology that they needed to embed this crap irrevocably in the IDE? Or that they purposefully embedded it so that slurping up your code is hard to disentangle from diagnostics data collection?
Yeah as a long time user and lover of multiple JetBrains IDEs this is the first feature I'd consider was user-hostile, forced upon you and taking up valuable real estate, when all I want is to disable and never be interrupted by it again. I believe I was able finally to disable it in the latest release, hopefully it doesn't become something I have to disable on every update.
This feature felt like an intrusive Windows Ad or an unwanted U2 Album that has no place in a commercial tool.
It can be disabled now, it couldn't before. Instead it continually nagged about needing to be updated. Something I never wanted or used (that's effectively an Ad for a paid service) shouldn't be interrupting my dev workflow in a commercial tool.
People LOVE to be outraged. I don't use jetbrain products at all, and find these outrage reactions hilarious.
There's a whatsapp group where neighbors of my gated community chat, about current issues in the community. Realistically, you mostly see the people that don't work and have nothing to do while their kids return from school . And they basically whine about the most absurd an asinine things. We call it "argüende" in Spanish. People forming a storm in a teacup with these threads look similar to that.
Imagine waking up every morning to your neighbour parking their pram in front of your apartment door so every time when you go out you need to move it out of the way.
How many times will you suffer that before becoming outraged yourself? That's what I feel after every update, on all the 3 IDEs times 2 of the computers that I'm using. Do you allow me to be annoyed at this?
You can disable this plugin but its mere existence can spook legal to force a ban pending "evaluation" and "compliance clearance". I should be able to uninstall it completely.
Unrelated to this, I've been getting repeatedly irked by JetBrains' insistence that I update disabled plugins alongside IDE updates. Why would I want to update stuff that I don't use?
I'm guessing the idea is that yes, it's disabled now, but if you really didn't want it, you remove it (except for AI, of course, which you can't). If you have it installed, why not keep it up to date, so when you decide you want it you have the latest version?
That's would mean homogenizing all jetbrains ides, as theyre all essentially the same program with a different set of bundled plugins, optimized for web, Jvm, c, Python etc
The article mentions that removing a bundled plugin would break the code signing. I suspect allowing you to not update a bundled plugin poses a similar problem, they probably have a single signature for the entire package including bundled plugins.
I don’t understand the outrage. The plugin is installed by default and visible in the right tray so it’s basically an advertisement. That’s the only negative part and I understand the frustration with that.
You can disable it like any other plugin though? Really easily? And it’s a paid service. Just don’t pay for it.
Seems like rage bait that a lot of people are falling for.
Of course, if it turns out it’s phoning home with training data by default then I will also change my tune, but it doesn’t seem to be doing that
> The plugin is installed by default and visible in the right tray so it’s basically an advertisement (...) a paid service
A persistently visible ad for a paid service you don't want, in a paid product you paid for? That alone is a justifiable reason for the outrage.
But the more important bit is that, if legal says "no", then "but it's inert" isn't an answer people are willing to risk their employment for.
Also:
> if it turns out it’s phoning home with training data by default then I will also change my tune, but it doesn’t seem to be doing that
We live in the age where open source package managers and build tools come with built-in, opt-out invasive telemetry, and I'm talking bona fide OSS, not something by Microsoft. It's reasonable to assume that the plugin is, or at some point will be, phoning home, until proven otherwise.
> A persistently visible ad for a paid service you don't want, in a paid product you paid for? That alone is a justifiable reason for the outrage.
Oh, you mean like up- and cross-selling CTAs in, well, virtually any SaaS product under the sun? If that was a reason for outrage, we’d spend the work week screaming. Or is it that you just want to be enraged because an LLM is involved here?
Are you arguing that this kind of advertising is a good or neutral thingm. Or that life just kind of sucks and we need to get used to it? I'd rather push for better software and advertising practices, personally...
Neither, really. I hate ads as much as the next guy, but
a) people seem to have no big problems with upselling in the myriad of other subscription services they use (at least I can’t remember regular ”outrage“), and
b) a few subtle buttons in the UI that offer to buy an extension are hardly as atrocious as some people here act like.
Life does kinda suck and we do need to get used to it, I guess. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for a better world, but until we don’t have a working alternative to advertising, I’d rather have models like JetBrains than Adobe…
I think this example is a great example of a benefit of telemetry. If your telemetry tells you that a _very large number of people_ are using it, and you have complaints from a number of people who have _never used it_ (or disabled telemetry), that tells you there's value in what you're doing.
Some people will never be happy, e.g.
> We live in the age where open source package managers and build tools come with built-in, opt-out invasive telemetry, and I'm talking bona fide OSS, not something by Microsoft. It's reasonable to assume that the plugin is, or at some point will be, phoning home, until proven otherwise.
That's a false equivalence to OP's point - there's a _stark_ different between telemetry and phoning home with training data.
> If your telemetry tells you that a _very large number of people_ are using it, and you have complaints from a number of people who have _never used it_ (or disabled telemetry), that tells you there's value in what you're doing.
This is how you lose thousand seats enterprise licensing deals without even realizing it.
> That's a false equivalence to OP's point - there's a _stark_ different between telemetry and phoning home with training data.
Yeah, arguably the former is worse. In the latter case, the data is actually relevant to the product and there's a chance of the user directly benefiting from it.
Why don't people let the police install cameras in their home!? It just cuts down on crime. If you aren't committing crimes you have nothing to worry about.
This is an incredibly bad read on what telemetry is and a terrible analogy. Total hyperbole and non sequitur.
Most telemetry in the real world is literally just like Sentry and "oh there's a crash or error. Here's what the user may have done when it happened" or "this feature is not used as much while this one is very popular". Equating it to police spying on people and imprisoning would-be criminals or innocents is utter nonsense
1. Developers managed just fine in times before pervasive telemetry was normalized.
2. How "data driven" development usually fails in practice, and is a false promise - that is indeed a big and interesting topic, spanning across issues like Goodhart's law, or whether the data is used to "improve your experience" as if the user was a Thanksgiving turkey.
3. But even if you are of pure intentions and able to avoid all the pitfals of 2, I have no reason to believe that. As a user, I don't know you, I don't trust you. All I know is that, before telemetry became something developers suddenly can't do a good job without, it was the domain of spooks, criminals, and shady advertisers. We used to call it "spyware" and classified it as a form of malware. What reason do I have to believe you are and will forever be using this data in my interest, and not against it?
4. Between HIPAA, GDPR and various cybersecurity policies of one's organization/employer, your benign, unadvertised, opt-out telemetry may be landing some of your users in hot water - and it's the major reason why organizations keep getting stricter about what can or cannot be installed on work machines. Savvy users will prefer to avoid your telemetry-rich product, rather than to take the risk of a fuss with IT or Legal if the product captures some bits of protected information.
> A persistently visible ad for a paid service you don't want, in a paid product you paid for? That alone is a justifiable reason for the outrage.
I get that it feels icky but if you're going to get this outraged about every company that includes an upsell in a paid product you're going to die young. It's hard to think of a paid product without some kind of upsell.
My work MacBook Pro nags me to sign up to Apple Music. My home PC wants me to upgrade my OneDrive account. Google Photos thinks I should buy more storage. The Economist's paid podcast feed wants me to take a subscription to the magazine.
>if you're going to get this outraged about every company that includes an upsell in a paid product you're going to die young.
Most products that do this tend to be free or one time paid experiences, and it's a single pop-up. I don't necessarily mind someone telling me "hey thanks for using X try Y from us!".
The dynamic changes if I explicitly pay to, in part, not see stuff like that. I don't pay for anything of google except $20/month for some drive space, I won't complain much about ads.
Dynamic changes even more when it's a part of professional tools. Sell a carpenter a new toolbox, but don't mess with their wrench. I don't mind Jetbrains telling me "hey, Rust IDE is here take a look". But don't tamper with Rider or whatever other IDE I'm using in the meantime.
It’s all the rage and tons of people are already paying for CoPilot plugin, only makes sense for IDEA to capture their share of the market but letting users know the feature exists. Other than that it’s not in the way at all.
> There's nothing I can do about it, so I can either accept it or be angry all the time.
This here is exactly why telemetry is worth little with general users, and why the whole tech market is supplier-driven: over the past decades, most users have learned to expect software to be broken, devices to suck (except for the vacuum cleaners). They've learned to live with it, only occasionally making futile requests for help to their tech-savvy friends or family members (the well-known "can you fix my computer? it's slow because it got viruses" thing). Telemetry is not observing the frustration, but the coping, so there's very little signal related to quality and usefulness in it.
So please tell me, specifically, what I personally can do to affect actual change. Instead of just criticizing me for not giving myself a stomach ulcer being angry all the time.
This wasn't meant as personal criticizm, I apologize I made it come across as one.
I meant to highlight your comment, because you uttered the exact words and sentiment I believe best describes the relationship between technology and most of population. This is relevant to the parallel subthread on "what's the gripe with telemetry", and also why we're getting increasingly many little frustrations we're asked to accept. This is why, IMO, the whole "we make what data tells us users want" argument and approach is flawed - the audience is captive, so the data only shows what people are willing to live with.
FWIW, I too believe in choosing your own battles. I don't complain about every little frustration I have with tech either. But I try to not accept it as OK either - for one day, I may be in the supplier position, and I'd like to remember this then, and not make shite products.
When people say that they don't understand something, it's as this. They don't read other comments below or above them. Do you want a course in psychology or about human behavior? Please read other people's views and then you'll understand why they may be outraged. If after you don't understand, I don't know what to tell you. You simply don't know how to understand understanding. Spend some time reflecting on that.
It's probably because macOS bundles are nowadays notarized by Apple, and if you change the content of the .app "folder", it breaks their verification chain. Learned painfully about that when trying do implement plugins on our end too
What blows my mind is that you can’t disable it. It’s fine to include features, but perhaps the feature should be optional and you should see if it gets adoption before making it a default? Doesn’t seem at all user centric for a development tools company to operate so anti-common sense.
If I had any advice to JB, whose tools I have used for years, please start listening to customer feedback better. You’re coming off as corporate overlords who bestow perfected dev tools on developers and it’s not a good look for the company.
It possible to disable this plugin. I have it disabled.[1]
The linked YouTrack thread[2] in the article says so as well. It is just not possible to remove the plugin entirely from your device.
Regarding the plugin being enabled by default the official response by Jetbrains says [3]
The AI Assistant plugin is enabled by default and menu items and tool windows are visible in the UI. However, AI Assistant functionality is NOT available by default, and NO requests are sent to the JetBrains AI Service unless ALL of the following conditions are met:
- The user has explicitly consented to use the AI Assistant and is using the trial or has purchased the corresponding subscription.
- The AI Assistant has not been disabled for a particular project.
- In the case of a commercial IDE license, the AI Assistant has to have been enabled at the organizational level. We’d like to reiterate that for commercial IDE licenses, unless this is explicitly enabled by your organization’s administrators, AI Assistant will not be available.
I'm not saying this is perfect and this can obviously still be a problem on e.g work devices.
On release, IIRC, disabling it did not work persistently, ostensibly due to a combination of bugs, so a lot of people found that especially egregious.
I think it was something like it would default to enabled again if you uninstalled the updated version, since you can't uninstall the bundled version? I don't quite recall.
Yeah, I mean a plugin is called a plugin because it should also be possible to plug it out easily?
But still, I don't really understand what the outcry is about. If JetBrains really wanted to siphon off your code for training (or for some other nefarious) purposes, it could do that independently of the AI assistant plugin? The IDEs are closed source, and they constantly talk to JetBrains servers over encrypted channels, so if they really wanted to do it, it would be hard to detect. If it came out it would be the end of JetBrains however, so I don't think they would do that, but they could theoretically do it even without the AI assistant enabled or installed...
People are probably more worried about the 'AI' training itself on the code that's sent to it and then showing snippets to everyone else that tries to do something similar.
If the IDE without the plugin would send code to JetBrains, someone bored and with a packet sniffer will catch them.
If the AI plugin actually sends code to JetBrains, it's part of the plugin functionality.
is this gonna be some fancy organic label for repos?
Create an empty file named .noai in the root directory of the project.
When this file is present, all AI Assistant features are fully disabled for the project. Even if this project is opened in another IDE, the AI Assistant features will not be available.
You only need that if you want to ensure no other developer uses the AI features of JetBrains, the plugin doesn't do anything until you pay them / activate a trial.
It's just a naked money grab. It's another subscription revenue stream and it's clear they were desperate to get their half-baked solution in to compete with Copilot and ChatGPT.
Too bad, because it's so bad quality-wise. Worst AI assistant I've tried so far, even compared to first gen Copilot.
If they had made it an optional download and focused on quality instead of enshittification, I would've happily paid for such a thing. As it is, it makes me question whether I should even renew my Jetbrains sub (that I've had for more than a decade).
I'm kinda getting to that point as well. The new UI is a big one for me. The issue is that it hides a lot of the buttons until you hover over a certain area. If I want to minimize the terminal, I have to move my pointer to the terminal's toolbar and only then will the minimize button appear. That means that I can't target the minimize button. It becomes a two-step process with a slight delay waiting for the minimize button to fade in so I can move the cursor to it.
Likewise, the "x" button to close tabs is hidden until you hover over the tab. This means that I'll go to try and select a tab and when I move my cursor over the tab and click, an "x" has just appeared under my cursor and I close the tab instead! Whoops, I guess I should have known better than to aim my cursor at the right portion of the tab.
It feels like they're trying to make it seem more like VSCode, but it's just poor UX from where I'm sitting. Plus, as VSCode gets better, I'm finding less reason to keep paying for the JetBrains suite.
Yeah, I ended up switching to neovim because I was getting sick of my Jetbrains IDE. It seemed like it has been getting slower, and the New UI was pretty meh. And I was already using the vim mode plugin.
Switching to neovim was definitely painful at first because I had to figure out all of the plugins to get IDE-level functionality. But after a couple weeks, it was in a good place.
Now, a year later, I’m so much more productive than I was, the UI is nearly instant, and everything is where I want it. And the features don’t generally change much unless I want them to. Only feature that I miss is the git conflict resolution. The jetbrains three-pane UI around merge conflicts is incredible and I still haven’t found a good replacement.
I switched back too, as the new UI is just... ugly. It looks and feels more like something for children than a serious IDE. I've even gone back and tried it in earnest, but in all honesty I just don't understand why JetBrains have spent so much time and effort on something that's simply worse than the original UI.
I'm dreading the day where the old UI is replaced with the new UI... I might seriously have to look at going back to Visual Studio, and I'd really rather not - I just want to keep the existing, perfectly fine UI!
Second that. I was tepid on WSL on initial release, but recently decided to try a full switch after hearing good things and I'm glad I did. You're literally using a full Linux distro, it's really fast, and it even has neat integrations with windows like allowing use of windows explorer if you're inclined. And it's totally seamless to use with vscode.
So far I managed to get by using wsl just for redis, most software packages these days do actually have decent windows version, including pytorch etc. I considered switching over to wsl more, but I ran to wsl being very slow in terms of filesystem access, I think it had something to do with wsl 1 being (somewhat?) native while wsl 2 runs under hyperv. I think it's still not fixed.
Wsl2 has been significantly faster for me as long as I store the files in the wsl drive. I had react projects that would completely fail to get through npm install on windows but finished no problem on wsl.
I’ve never experienced Gradle outright breaking itself, but it does deprecate things at a high rate. We try to update dependencies whenever we touch a project, which every few months means making an adjustment for whatever Gradle decided to deprecate and start warning about now.
I’ll still take it every time over Mavens XML based config though.
I would consider myself a very advanced Gradle user. I keep up with experimental/nightly features and best-practices.
I have a love-hate relationship with Gradle. I think it's a better alternative to XML (if you keep it declarative and any kind of stateful logic the hell out of your build scripts).
BUT. Gradle introduces breaking API changes frequently, and they have changed around "best practices" every year or two.
You can easily see this by using "gradle init" to create a new project. It used to be the case that "buildSrc" was the recommended way to do multi-module build logic composition. But it didn't even work with the recommended "libs.versions.toml" file for managing dep versions (you couldn't reference the generated code from within your buildSrc logic).
Sometimes I consider switching to Maven, lol. Have to weigh the effort required to keep up w/ changes against the benefit of using strongly-typed build files.
I honestly don’t understand this position. You’d rather have to update your build or have it be inconsistent or down right broken over having to write some XML?
Unfortunately you can't use it for Kotlin/JS anymore. Jetbrains recently removed the Maven support from the Kotlin/JS tooling, so it now just pops up a message telling you to migrate to Gradle.
This has always been the jetbrains customer experience. They don't prioritize quality so if you're unlucky they'll break your workflow repeatedly, and the fixes will arrive in a major release with new bugs that you have to pay for.
I eventually gave up and ate the productivity loss that came from ditching their products.
This is the kind of decision a company makes when they are panicking about getting left behind by the latest thing.
A somewhat similar example would have been Microsoft way back in the 90s and 2000s bundling their own browser and then almost forcing you to use it. “We have to own this!”
It's so bizarre to me what they have been doing lately. This and that horrible new UI designed entirely for 13" screens or tablets which just turns their IDE into VS Code. They are trying to compete with a free product by trying to imitate (but still charging $500+ per year..)
You can be better, more user focused, have better privacy, but it’s tough to beat good enough and free.
Microsoft wants to own the developer ecosystem and is willing to dump billions in free software and services to annihilate any third party shops. They are pretty close to owning the entire stack of core services and tooling other than the languages themselves.
The sad thing is that in their push to keep up Jetbrains is dropping a major thing that made them appealing vs VSCode: a lack of spying and telemetry.
I see it more as forcing its use so nobody can say they failed. Suppose you pay millions in AI developers and time training the model, only for it to be ignored by most users. Having no off-switch (like me when I start drinking) allows them to point to how many "active users" they have and what great feats it's enabled developers to accomplish.
I'm more concerned about being forced into a crappy new UI which I don't want. If I wanted minimal I'd use VScode. They'll make it progressively more difficult to keep the actual IDE look with multiple windows, consoles etc since they'll realise the cost of supporting multiple UIs.
You can disable the new UI though, and I doubt that will change. Hopefully they understand they'd lose a significant chunk of their userbase if they force the new UI onto their users.
I think the median developer would rather use Eclipse over IntelliJ's new UI if those were the only options. It looks very pretty, but it's just such a pain in the ass to use. It takes an interface that is already so low-contrast and so hard to parse it's bordering on an accessibility problem, and makes all those regrettable design qualities a hundred times worse.
The one good thing that's it does though is convincingly demonstrate the principle that design is primarily about how something functions, and not how it looks.
> You can disable the new UI though, and I doubt that will change
They have been pretty vocal that long-term it will be removed and that it probably won't be included in the 2025 version. Of course hopefully they'll come to their senses but the experience will likely get worse and worse longarm even if they keep it...
It's bizarre though. I mean I get that some people might prefer their new look due to various reasons but at that point why not just use VS code and save the $500+...
If they force me to use the new UI I'm gone, it's that simple. Either the new UI has window configuration parity or its over. I want every tab exactly where it is today (with the exception of the Structure tab which should be on the right by default)
Long time user of one of their IDEs here and I was willing to try it. It's next to unusable at the current state. It messed up existing code, removed code which was not in scope of the task to be completed etc. Worst. Trial. Ever.
Now more than ever, Little Snitch comes to the rescue. Cloud-based AI is completely neutered if the cloud is inaccessible.
Honestly, the biggest reason to use a Mac over anything else may well be Little Snitch. I could probably configure Linux not to phone home on my own, and almost certainly couldn't do so with Windows, but on a Mac with Little Snitch? I know I'm covered.
I was doing it with ZoneAlarm on Windows years before Little Snitch even existed, as far as I can tell. If you want to use a Mac, use a Mac, but it doesn't seem sensible to claim it's superior to other platforms when you don't know about them.
> it doesn't seem sensible to claim it's superior to other platforms when you don't know about them.
I didn’t, I just said I probably couldn’t do so with Windows. If you feel comfortable with ZoneAlarm, then great, but I personally am yet to be convinced that it’s even possible to really lock down a non-Unix (or Unix-like) system. In any case, I’m quite certain I couldn’t do it, and I don’t have nearly enough confidence in my understanding of how Windows network security works (does anyone really?) to say whether any given application works or not.
But if it works for you, then great. All I know is that Little Snitch does the job easily and effectively, and I don’t trust anything else to work as easily or reliably.
I'm certain you could do it. You install ZoneAlarm (or equivalent), tell it to block everything (by clicking a checkbox or something), and allow or deny connection requests when they pop up.
You did make that claim, but whatever: "Honestly, the biggest reason to use a Mac over anything else may well be Little Snitch."
Even assuming that blocking DNS were sufficient to stop spyware (it's not), how exactly am I going to block DNS for every single application that may or may not phone home without my knowledge, including applications that are hardcoded with DNS server information that doesn't respect the system settings?
And yes, I have seen (and blocked) applications that have made requests to 8.8.8.8 when I didn't have my system DNS server set to that. I would have had no idea if not for Little Snitch alerting me.
It's really weird that Hacker News has become so full of Windows apologists in the last few years. It wasn't all that long ago that Slashdot was depicting Bill Gates as the Borg. Where did we go wrong?
So no factual arguments? Just name-calling? I honestly don't care about OSes as long as they do what I need from them without having to tinker for days.
Some users prefer golden cages, some prefer freedom, others simply don't care.
If that's a problem for you, then that's clearly a you-problem, not an issue with the community.
I'm so happy I switched to neovim at the end of 2022, just in time to avoid feeling angry but powerless with hyped-driven decisions from whatever company I depend on for my tools
I've been paying for Pycharm since about 2015, dealing with the memory issues and slowness. This is approaching the hair that broke the camel's back. Any neovim plugin extension recommendations for python or JS?
This may go against the whole ethos of using neovim, but I would suggest giving LazyVim[0] a try.
- Dead simple to install
- Sane defaults
- IDE like out of the box
- Still feels like VIM
- Configurable
- Actions are discoverable (press space and a menu pops up with all the possible shortcuts)
- Good enough docs
Before I moved to LazyVim I always used VSC with the vim plugin installed before I took the full plunge and went all in on LazyVim (I don't care for vim itself but I like the motions).
It was also the sweet spot for me, I don't like configuring my tools for work but I like using well designed tools and discovering things along the way
I suggest looking for blog posts about this, you're gunnuh wanna pick out a plugin manager and stuff. It's kind of like a package manager for neovim. You can install everything manually but usually you manually install a plugin manager use it to install the rest of your plugins.
These two plugins are the bare minimum in my view.
Treesitter gives you much better syntax highlighting based on a parser for a given language. It's much more robust than the regex-based default highlighting.
This plugin helps you connect to a given language LSP quickly with sensible defaults so you can get IDE features. You'll still need to install the LSP though.
I started exploring the neovim world. It's a bit of work to get started but I'm getting close to realizing the same, or pretty close to, features that I expect. I haven't gotten to renaming, moving methods, etc. yet though.
I started with NvChad (weird name) and have been happy so far. I love to ecosystem of Pycharm Professional, but I have to restart it frequently as it slows down my system. I haven't been able to determine if it's a specific plugin, or just a result of my fairly bland usage patterns.
I would suggest to be very very very willing to switch, as it took me at least 2-3 months to get comfortable. Also at the time, it was kind of a new year's resolution, so my will was strong. Nonetheless, I don't regret it, once you get used to it, it's fast and does basically the same thing as your IDE (except maybe the debugging part, which is ok if like me, you are println oriented)
The only reason I'm using JetBrains at all right now is because Rider is cross platform. With Microsoft announcing the discontinuation of Visual Studio on Mac, I get really tired of the context shifting between Visual Studio at work and Rider at home.
Additionally, are the costs of Visual Studio over Rider. My work pays for my Visual Studio Subscription, which does not allow for personal use. The JetBrains Ultimate sub is affordable for me, but this AI integration has me rethinking this.
JetBrains has been on their ass lately with their product decisions. AI integration, the horrible new diff viewer, the new UI - which is still awful and has 0 benefit for me.
Wait until you experience the raging dumpster fire that is the new Terminal in the EAPs - I lack enough language to describe my burning hatred for it, and (of course) there's no way to go back to the previous one
Yeah on RubyMine at least, it's off by default and you have to turn it on. In fact, the account administrator has to turn it on if you have a site license, as we do. And when I requested for it to be turned on, it was declined because of the risk that closed-license code would thereby wend its way into our (open source) product ...
We still use PHP for some of our projects and there's a massive gulf between PhpStorm and anything else, especially if you work with modern PHP and Laravel (Laravel Idea). Back in the day I used to like Netbeans PHP, but that got left in the dust as soon as Oracle stopped maintaining it and gave it to Apache. Half of the "features" being worked on at that time (by a handful of people and basically for free) were task needed to remove/replace non-OSS Oracle stuff. Last time I checked literally like 2 (two) people contributed to the PHP improvements and bugfixes in (one of the) latest major Netbeans releases. That's a random, minor release for PhpStorm.
I don't see the usual 'uninstall' button for this plugin, it has 'uninstall update' instead. After I've pressed 'uninstall update' the plugin is still in installed plugins list (but with an older version).
To be fair, it's not possible to uninstall any 'bundled' plugin, like Node.js plugin in Webstorm. But for AI assistant they could make an exception: make it installed by default, but no bundled, so that users could uninstall it completely.
I count ~125 bundled plugins for my install of Intellij IDEA 2023.3.3. JetBrains's problem is they bundle too many plugins. It's not a bundled AI plugin that requires a separate subscription to work and to be whitelisted for corporate accounts.
I for one really like it. It really feels to me like the right way to do this sort of thing.
By default, it's offline, so no privacy worries. Secondly, it works really well for me. It really does suggest what I'm about to write more often than not.
Actually tried paying for the service, not very impressed. Suggestions are most mly lacking the necessary context to be applicable. Doesn't seem like it is considering anything other than the exact highlighted code
I don't see the issue if it can be disabled. Once disabled it is no different from many other features that it contains but are not used. If you don't trust them no point anyway running a closed source program.
As a user, this annoys me too because it's so intrusive and obnoxious. I don't care about the privacy angle, but their AI isn't as good as Copilot and is much worse than ChatGpt. Tried it for a day or two and then wanted to turn it off since it wasn't very good, but you can't. And it keeps bugging me on every update.
This is the sort of thing that makes me reconsider using Jetbrains at all, even though I prefer it to VScode. Enshittification rarely reverses once it starts...
To be fair, they do seem to immediately want to reverse it?
Not that I really disagree with the premise though. IntelliJ has not gotten any better with every update for a few years, but it does get slower and slower.
This article is referencing an old situation. It's been like this for weeks, maybe months, and they've been dragging their heels at the removal.
Jetbrains in general is really poor at dealing with user feedback. My pet issue (showing the path in search results and tabs, so you don't just have a bunch of index.js files that you can't tell apart) has been ignored for years despite consistent votes and comments.
Intellij did get better over the years and did not get slower IME. Many of their features are not very flashy, but provide significant QoL improvements - automated refactorings, data flow analysis. Their git support keeps improving almost every release.
Hm. I didn't know there was an installed-per-default assistant. Maybe it's disabled if your workplace uses Copilot?
I use Rider, WebStorm, Datagrip, CLion (and occasionally Android Studio) and haven't had this thing thrown in my face yet. The "new UI" can go diaf though.
> Maybe it's disabled if your workplace uses Copilot?
It unfortunately doesn’t appear that it is. I downgraded my Jetbrains IDEs because AI Assistant kept trying to clobber over my other tools, even when disabled.
JetBrains is just leading the pack in what's coming everywhere. What? You don't want to pay for your 4th monthly subscription to another shitty ChatGPT wrapper? Too bad and welcome to 2024.
After using JB tools for years, I switched to VSCodium last year. My advice to anyone considering switching, stick with it for a few weeks. There is a lot of muscle memory to rebuild and it won't be a smooth experience at first. Stick it out, and you will be rewarded with a libre IDE that you control.
Seems like you still lose the Python plugin and remote extensions? Missing the wsl one is pretty rough. If you’re comfortable with vim (or want to be) I can’t recommend neovim enough.
As a paid customer I have to say this has to go. IMMEDIATELY.
I was surprised when it showed-up out of nowhere during the latest update.
The problem is very simple: AI and cloud solutions can be VERY problematic in certain domains.
Read: A deeply undesirable liability.
We had the same problem when Altium decided to take their Altium Designer electronics CAD products and pretty much force everyone into having this cloud-based layer in the tool. No. Thanks. We cannot do that. At all. After decades with Altium, we switched to KiCad. Works fine for the vast majority of designs, even fairly sophisticated work. More importantly, the cloud-based liability is gone. For anything else --which has been very rare-- we have older non-cloud releases of AD we can use.
Don't shove AI or cloud onto your customers. Let them choose. Some can't risk it at all. AI-generated code might sound fantastic to some. While, in other circles, it opens the door to untold liability. I don't want that shit to even show-up without a very explicit installation of a feature, plug-in, extension or whatever. It needs to be conclusively and demonstrably separable.
Also, always remember customers have options. Be careful. We are actually considering moving away from JetBrains tools for this very reason. For now, we'll wait and see. More specifically, we'll wait and see if all semblance of AI is removed from the tools by default and only available as an explicitly installed extension. I have to be able to have tools audited (in a legal context) and show that AI was not a part of the process.
For us, this does not add value. It adds liability.
Well that's some obvious PR bullshit; clearly the feature needs deep integration to work, but I don't believe for a second that it's doing so in any way other than hooking into Jetbrains' core API.
The notion that a novelty feature from the last couple of years needs to be implemented in such a way as to render it impossible to remove from a 20 year old IDE is patently absurd.
It's a nice addition to the usual autocomplete. My only complaint is the full line suggestion overrides the selected code completion suggestion when they're both bound to the TAB key. They recommend binding the RIGHT ARROW key for full line suggestions which is a decent compromise.
> "Although the AI Assistant plugin is bundled, and the plugin itself is enabled, there is no AI functionality enabled by default, and no data is sent off-machine without your consent," said Ellis, echoing similar replies posted to some of the discussion threads. "You have to log in, accept the data policies and either purchase a subscription or start a trial."
> There is no AI functionality enabled by default, and no data is sent off-machine without your consent
> "Any data sent to the AI service is not used for training.
So many (maybe most) of the comments on HN don’t reflect the actual situation:
- AI is not enabled by default
- Code is not ingested for training purposes
- You have to either sign up for a trial or purchase a subscription
- You would have to explicitly accept the data policy to even begin using it
So the real complaint of these people is that the plugin simply exists by default, which apparently is enough to get the product banned from certain companies.
All of the comments speculating about it collecting your code for their training purposes or doing 3rd party AI things without your consent, or being enabled without any warning are easily disproven by a quick read of the article. It’s getting hard to read HN comments about anything AI related with all of these comments substituting their own assumptions and assuming the worst case scenario without any effort to read the article.