I doubt they're buying it for Composer, I imagine they're buying it for the agent harness. It's arguably the best non-Anthropic agentic coding harness, and you get _all the models_ for one subscription price.

Maybe vertical integration is the main business case.

A controlled environment to determine effort and token usage, and to get plenty of exclusive training on code.

It could end up making sense. Idk if they needed to offer 60B though.

I'm not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I think this is purely Elon trying to take a pot shot at Anthropic.

JetBrains is crying in the corner...

I've subscribed to Jetbrains all product for years. If the agent coding is going to be the next wave. Jetbrains is really behind. Even Microsoft offer better agent coding with VScode and Github copilot cli.

They’re definitely playing catch up, but the IDE integration makes interactive development really nice. Claude is good for one-shotting things, but I find JetBrains AI integration really useful for working with large codebases where I may be unfamiliar with things.

I think they’ve been caught in a bad spot. They’re a profitable company, but nowhere on the scale of Microsoft. And they don’t have billions of VC to effectively price dump. Other tools that can focus on one thing and burn cash are advancing quickly and some of them don’t really need an IDE at all.

The semi-recent introduction of ACP integration in the JetBrains IDEs has been a nice bridge. But now it’s confusing how everything comes together. I really hope they can survive.

Jetbrains has gone so far downhill

I honestly can’t believe how poorly JetBrains has done. I used to love PyCharm but now it’s so far behind. I still use DataGrip but it is absolute dogshit when it comes to agentic coding.

I was a massive jetbrains fan - still believe it's the best IDE even with it's massive performance issues.

But I just... barely use an IDE anymore. I think I have the lowest possible subscription price for "all products" you can have (at least as an outsider) and I think I'm going to cancel this year. I've been paying for a decade+

I am subscribed to their all you can eat plan and use their Junie coding agent which is included with subscription with some free tokens. I then pay for extra tokens on on-need basis and all works like a charm. So far I pay (well my clients do as I bill separately for that) about $100 a month to cover my current coding needs. All works as a charm. I mostly use their CLion, Webstorm and PyCharm IDE's for development, sometimes other as well. All in all dev experience is excellent and far exceeds that of Cursor I was trying to use for a while.

Not sure what problems people here have with JetBrains offerings

Once you work somewhere that gives you unlimited opus 4.6 and learn how to use it properly, your perspective of what you should be doing day to day shifts.

Honestly unlimited codex with 5.4 high has a similar effect.

SOTA models + harnesses used together is very different than it was 6 months ago. People that have significant software engineering experience can get so much done it's scary.

I keep hearing this, but I have yet to see “so much getting done” anywhere. I’d sure like to but things seem to be pretty much be business as normal.

This was absolutely the case - not actually that much more productive - until only a few months ago.

We hit some sort of tipping point between models and harnesses and people learning how to use the tools idk.

And directs / engineers / friends seem happier.

Simon Wilson recently did a podcast where he discussed his experience and it felt very familiar.

Worth listening (ignore the click bait title) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc8FBhQtdsA

I have what you call "significant engineering experience", decades of it to be precise and have designed and developed many complex products successfully used in various industries.

I do not need to "shift my perspective" since I do use agents to the degree that I need and it helps help me very much. I am way more productive with them.

Generated code is still not perfect disregarding of any particular model (I have access to all). I have to watch and fix, sometimes by supplying more precise specs, sometimes asking to rewrite piece of code in such and such manner using this and that structures.

Wasn't meant to be personal- I was using the proverbial "you".

I keep seeing what I'm referring to happen - folks are using / opening their editor less and less.

What's crazy is a developer can go on a walk and use tmux/tailscale and keep working as if they were sitting at their desk.

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Unless you do Jakarta EE development, where Cursor with their simple LSP support is far, far behind. Cool for generating a bean, but when you got to debugging deployment descriptors you wish you were in IntelliJ.

Yeah, and it seems to be completely self-inflicted. I created a small personal skillset that explains to the agent how to use the JetBrains MCP tools for refactorings/find-usage/navigation, and it improved its performance by a lot.

Yet JetBrains tried to do everything themselves and failed :(

I use JetBrain's all you can eat subscription that comes with their Junie coding agent which includes some free tokens to cover my coding needs. I then top up tokens on on-need basis. Costs me about $100 / month in AI tokens (well I bill my clients for that separately so do not really care bout the price). All works as a charm. I mostly use their CLion, Webstorm and PyCharm IDE's for development, sometimes other as well. All in all dev experience is excellent and far exceeds that of Cursor I was trying to use for a while.

Not sure what problems people here have with JetBrains offerings

IntelliJ is a bit dated, and its plugins are too. I use IntelliJ all the time, in its various incarnations, but vscode is really up there now.

I use both (not IntelliJ but other IDEs) and quite frankly I fund VS Code and derivatives very much inferior. For C++ development for example CLion vs VS Code (needed plugins installed) is night and day and not to the benefit of VS Code.

I know JetBrain product could be sluggish on "normal" computers however all 4 of my development machines run on 16 cores AMD with 128GB RAM. It flies in environments like that