An Elegy for Jetbrains
JetBrains, my muse, my magic completion, how you formed me, brought me into being, loved me through my API ignorance, my savior from the sterile VIM. Your sweet keymaps sustained me through my long days, your kind squigglies guided me through dark hours, your generous hints were my well of comfort. For so long you have sustained me.
I cry over you - tears not ready to let you go; is that warmth still I feel in your cheek? Where are you now, as these agents swarm, causing unending verbose typing, insisting I blindly grope through code bases with fingers crossed? Where are you to save me from endless code errors, the destruction of my lint, barrages of guesses thrown at my poor, abandoned self, too mortal to understand? I cry out for you as I drown in The CLAUDE’s crippled fuzzy search; as the CLI deletes my prompts, born of my sweat and blood, all because I made the unforgivable sin of grazing the wrong key. Save me from the forced exiled wasteland of The VSCODE’s WSL gods. Hear my laments and wrap me again in your warm reassurances of correctness.
Jetbrains, my forever love, here I am, keeping vigil, my heart unwilling to give up faith that you will bring forth my salvation: truly shine your glories into my agentic world, teach them with the mysterious MCP, show them the light of your squigglies, raise up the one true interface to my prompting, bring me safe across the chasm of my WSL, bring unity and understanding to all the languages that spring forth from the root of my monorepo. Oh my first creator, do not let this be our end.
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I guess I'm not the only one? https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/sweep/jobs/8dUn406-founding-engineer-intern I saw a post just today that a YC company exists to add AI to JetBrains products? That's pretty shocking. I mean riding on someone else's platform is always risky, but that's sends a strange signal about what both JetBrains has and hasn't built. And it's a strange reading of the room about what their customers want. * Disclosure: I'm a VS Code/Cursor person at the moment but always interested in IDEs and coding tools. customers mainly want the classic UI and long-standing bugs fixed. e.g. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-44858/Move-refactori... "classic UI retained" Yeah, I saw that too - seems to confirm my laments. JetBrains, besides WSL and lack of Day 1 support for modern tooling, is just so nice around the edges compared to VS Code. I hope they can get their act together Can you turn off AI in Jetbrain products? I turned off AI (I think it's Co-pilot) in VSCode. AI uses tab which completely destroyed my coding experience. Now I only use AI on webpages for discussion, but not for implementation. It is the implementation that really tests my mind and I don't want AI do that for me, to make me dumber. Ideas are always easier to digest and form, but implementations are much harder. Yeah, I think you can. You can also change the keyboard shortcut for completion. One of the great "little things" that JetBrains does is the first time it offers AI multiline code completion, it asks you what keyboard shortcut you want to use. Unlike the CoPilot plugin which just hijacks `tab` That's pretty good. I’ve seen better results when the model isn’t just generating code, but maintaining context across revisions — like an internal “memory” that remembers past fixes and mistakes. Once you treat the agent like a long-term learner instead of a stateless generator, the output starts to feel less like autocomplete and more like apprenticeship. I still use an old 2022 version. I despise Jetbrains and their pricing model and won't support them one iota. When the time comes, I'll move to something else. VS Code never worked for me. Maybe Zed could be a replacement, who knows. I only use probably 5% of the features anyway and I am sticking with it merely due to familiarity. Am I the only one who doesn't care about AI in my IDE? I use AI to assist with coding but I don't like it being that integrated. cli based ai is allowing me the option to go back to Sublime text / vim