To do nothing is to die. I've been a JetBrains subscriber for over a decade. Nobody is going to use their tools in five years. I certainly don't need my subscription anymore.
> on some "also ran" LLM sinkhole.
They can't do Junie. It's a dead end. They can't do the same thing everyone else is doing either, or they're exactly as you put it: an "also ran" in a very crowded field.
The only way for JetBrains to survive is to figure out their Garmin play. They either find some niche within the existing product or - maybe (and very improbably) - they can innovate something wild nobody else has figured out yet that provides a path to new fertile pasture. But that's more the startup path than the thriving incumbent facing innovator's dilemma path.
But no matter what, if they stay the course, they're dead. Just like half the people expecting to still be writing code by hand.
I think they are trying new things even with "nobody writes code anymore" in mind. Their IDEs are now MCP servers for agents to reason about the code. Imagine your agent will stop wasting tokens using grep to find symbol usages if he can just ask IDE where it is used. They are not the best option for vibecoders right now but who knows what will happen in 1 year.
Integration with other developer tools, code reviews etc. are better than ever. Ideavim is probably the best vim plugin and it gets new features every month. They are also investing a lot in the AI.
I would bet they will survive just fine unless we would write software in slack only using emoji :-)
Imagine your agent will stop wasting tokens using grep to find symbol usages if he can just ask IDE where it is used. They are not the best option for vibecoders right now but who knows what will happen in 1 year.
Can't agents just use a language server? There are already a bunch of projects that provide this, e.g.: https://www.agent-lsp.com/
Doesn't seem like a huge differentiator anymore?
I don't really know much about their current users, but from a business perspective, post-tokenmaxxing and them having an IDE, it seems like the most efficient environment for having a human in the loop is something they could tackle?
Well nobody needs to use IDE. There were always people who used vim with tmux as their IDE. The value of IDE is the I as in integrated - I see some value in having easy to manage single dev environment with batteries included. (I'm not an IDE guy though, and I personally closer to vim/vscode + plugins)
There were always people who used vim with tmux as their IDE.
But until language servers, IDEs with built-in code analysis had a huge advantage. This stopped once LSP was designed and some language servers got mature. LSP was developed originally by VS Code and it is easy to see why - it allowed VS Code to compete with IDEs without writing their own code analysis by letting language developers write a standard server. This made VS Code (and others like Zed) so powerful, that they had already replaced IDEs for many users (maybe outside Java). LLMs are just another nail in the coffin.
No, it didn't stop. In my experience, LSPs are still incredibly poor and comparatively primitive vs the actual analysis that JetBrains have implemented. It's night-and-day different in terms of the supported refactorings, actual understanding of the types and the codebase etc.
Also, LSP is just poorly designed and inefficient. JSON-RPC was an awful choice, the specification text is not well-written and the whole thing feels like a Microsoft pet project for VS Code than an open specification that everyone agrees works well.
I think the name misleads people about LSPs. LSPs are basically plugins for VS Code. The protocol semantics are visual, so they're tied to what VS Code wanted to display on screen. They don't really change the game, especially as you always had the option of using IDEA's own plugins in other tools and text editors (yes! there is an API and you can start up a headless IDEA to access it, even from programs written in C or Rust).
Not many did that because JetBrains never cared much to properly document this path, and so using LSPs is a better paved cowpath. But that's because IDEs aren't a real business for Microsoft, whereas they are for JetBrains, and we know where that leads - the landscape is filled with the skeletons of dead IDEs that were just loss making corporate side projects, defunded and "donated" to some foundation once the executive sponsors moved on. NetBeans and Eclipse are two of the most obvious but there have been others.
The risk with VS Code is it goes the same way. Eventually Microsoft needs to cut back, perhaps due to needing more capital for AI or due to AI related losses, and in the general layoffs that follow VS Code gets cut back to a skeleton crew.
This is not the whole picture. IDE is not just for writing code. What I really like on jetbrains is how strong the platform is. I will show you example which would be great if they implement it.
If you use ideavim you can enable feature which shows you action ID you have currently triggered (Ideavim: Track action IDs). If you click on anything it will show you name of that action and you can setup vim shortcut for that. This way, you can use almost anything by just typing a few letters. But that is just a start.
Now imagine you can use this to create "macro" which will create something like skill for LLM. So in a few seconds to minutes you can create "skills"/runbooks for major refactorings, project updates, git bisections, project deployments, log analysis or whatever you can think of. You will just click on 20 features and it will record what you did with some additional context (files, connected services, build systems etc.). This is the strength of integrated tools.
Of course this is just my imagination but I am not the smartest person in the world and I am pretty sure/hope that someone in jetbrains or in other IDE company is thinking this way.
You envision a world in which humans don't look at code.
I think that world is farther off than you think, especially in critical line of business software. You can YOLO it with your internal dashboard or your hipster coffee review site, but in my 2M-line highly regulated banking system, humans sign off on the code - even if LLMs do most of the typing.
While I "vibe code" more and more these days, an IDE that still does code highlighting, I can use it to look up functions source and so on, it is very useful to be able to figure out what the LLM did.
And yes, there are people who use vim in a screen session, but I don't fit into that category. I like my GoLand IDE.
And while there are a ton of IDEs out there, I use what I'm used to.
And their MCP servers and tools are great! But I wish they’d remember that some of us also actually code in the IDE, because human usage quality of their IDEs has been getting worse in that time…
You are right, they fix even most annoying bugs really slowly. I also remember something like 2 years ago when they made pycharm unusable with poetry for several months and the release was like 18th of December (who decided to release tool for work as Christmas gift :-D ). The good thing is that you can always revert to older version and wait for proper fix.
Not using tooling (or not creating one) for repeating tasks and trying to one shot everything with latest frontier model is a difference between the bill for AI usage being 10 Eur or 10000 Eur
I disagree on to do nothing is also to die, I'd love to continue paying if they prioritized bugfixing, speed, remote/container editing and having an open AI ecosystem, as well as supporting any new language features without degenerating into an "always online" editor like vs.code.
I could not care less about "new paradigm" editors, UI reworks and AI lock-in offerings, the only AI I want is let me bring my own local model, or interface with claude / codex / ...
I have been Jetbrains subscriber for over a decade and stopped using them last year. Visual Studio Code did LLM integration better. And now I am using VS Code less and less with AI-native control plane like Paseo. I can literally develop on my mobile phone.
> They either find some niche within the existing product
They should stay in where they started, dev experience and IDEs custom for each language. Entering the AI coding was a mistake in my opinion, I’m sure one can argue that AI coding would have better tooling without their IDEs, but AI coders (Cc and codex) don’t use IDEs anymore so it’s a lost battle before the start
I remember around 2019 or so they shipped their first AI feature and there was a huge backlash for it. Did that change their direction in anyway? Obviously 2026 is a way different landscape than back then.
I love their tools and am keeping my subscription for now, but would have to agree.
VSCode has been eating at their users for years now. Jetbrains tools still were much better in my opinion but they are competing with “free” and “good enough”. With AI getting better, the main advantages of Jetbrains are gone.
I don’t need a massive IDE anymore. I still need an editor, but there’s hundreds of better tools for quick edits than a massive IDE.
It’s a company at the end of the day, but I hope they find a niche or pull a Garmin play like you said, otherwise I don’t see them being relevant.
They picked weird direction. "Here, pay ENTIRE EXTRA SUB to use the LLM we made that is worse than one you're already using".
Yeah, no, vast majority just want to pick a AI vendor and integrate it into their IDEA or CLion or whatever other editor they were already using. Pushing into entirely different subscription was dead on arrival.
They figured that out and started integrating it into main tooling (https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/33314-air), but they definitely wasted a bunch of resources on something nobody really wanted.
This was so annoying as a long time subscriber- we were begging them to get / let us integrate some of the more mainstream models - didn’t help that there early model was terrible
I look at it as like being able to start a fire in the woods without a lighter. It’s a skill, a helpful one even on the extremely rare occasions that it’s necessary. But realistically with even the bare minimum amount of prep, not a useful one.
How many people out there can do hand lithography to make an 8086 to bootstrap computing? One?
> How many people out there can do hand lithography to make an 8086 to bootstrap computing? One?
What does THAT have to do with whether people who dont use AI today will die soon? What does "hand lithography" have to do with literally anything here?
> Nobody is going to use their tools in five years.
What will replace it? The dumpster fire called Eclipse, certainly not. The even larger dumpster fire that is Electron based VS Code, also not. And "vibe coding", "agentic AI" etc. will also be a thing of the past once the VC money spigot selling tokens for far below actual cost dries up.
The JetBrains portfolio is here to stay.
(One might even see a total ban for American products in the EU or a significant push in sovereign technology on the horizon, and JB stands to profit from both options!)
I'm not a fan of VS Code myself, but everyone I know uses it (except for people I myself have influenced into using something else). It truly is a sort of default editor these days.
I guess it depends on your niche; I spend half my time coding Golang and Python, and the other half terraform, ansible, perl and I use other languages now and again for small projects and utilities.
In the devops/sysadmin world my stack would be common, and mostly people pick an editor and stick to it. I've been using Emacs for the past 20+ years at this point, and the last time I used Microsoft's IDE was back in the day when I was writing desktop apps using MFC (which probably dates me pretty well!) with visual studio.
I've seen colleagues use anything from atom, vim, emacs, notepad++, and other generic editors whos name I didn't recognize. There are one or two instances of VS Code I see now and again, but they're the outlier rather than the norm in my professional life.
To do nothing is to die. I've been a JetBrains subscriber for over a decade. Nobody is going to use their tools in five years. I certainly don't need my subscription anymore.
> on some "also ran" LLM sinkhole.
They can't do Junie. It's a dead end. They can't do the same thing everyone else is doing either, or they're exactly as you put it: an "also ran" in a very crowded field.
The only way for JetBrains to survive is to figure out their Garmin play. They either find some niche within the existing product or - maybe (and very improbably) - they can innovate something wild nobody else has figured out yet that provides a path to new fertile pasture. But that's more the startup path than the thriving incumbent facing innovator's dilemma path.
But no matter what, if they stay the course, they're dead. Just like half the people expecting to still be writing code by hand.