I like it except their data privacy policy is a deal breaker. I do not consent to having my code submitted to third parties without any restrictions on how it will be used.
That, and the many teams of lawyers who aren't allowing AI as is, until the copyright stuffs get figured out, means that I probably won't have AI in my IDE, at work, for a decade.
Oh wow, that's a situation I didn't consider, but almost certainly the future for most people. I could see something like, "Jerry, why isn't that report on my desk? Are you not using the AI again!?"
The way I understand it is that this is during the beta testing. It makes sense to offer it for free while they work out how it’s used and how to improve it. I’m expecting that once it’s paid, there’ll be a far more usable policy.
1) There's a "No" button in this dialog. It allows you to opt out from detailed data sharing, and you can still use the plugin.
2) In the next plugin update, we'll make it so that the detailed data sharing prompt is shown only in EAP builds of the IDE, and detailed data sharing is never enabled in release builds.
Disclaimer: I don't have a horse in this race, and don't use Jetbrains products.
I read the dialog, and the contents is extremely clear - I can send the non-anonymized data to help improve the product, or not. It doesn't say this is a required action to use the plugin. Less is more. I prefer less text with the clear prompt to consent or not. I don't think this needs a fine print of pages long terms and conditions.
Actually there's no difference in terms of how sharing code is handled. Both Copilot and AI Assistant send your code to a LLM, and neither of those tools will use your code for training code generation models.
The difference is Microsoft owns the model and they have control over the processes that work with our data. We have to take it under faith that you are protecting your users from the undisclosed third parties our data is being submitted to.
I was really excited to try this out in a EAP release a while ago… and I found nearly no use for it.
The auto scaffolded commit messages seemed like a cool application: they were overly wordy and missed the point of a commit message entirely by just dryly listing out the changes in each class.
The explain code feature seemed useful at first, but it wasn’t really much better than just reading the code. Had the benefit of working on some stuff I hadn’t worked on before too! Without links to the codebase, or any sort of inline tooltip, you just get a big paragraph in a sidebar thats difficult to grok and doesn’t really explain anything except what’s already self evident.
Wow, more JetBrains complaints than I expected. I’ve been using Rider for C# development for a while now (moved from Visual Studio - I’ve never been a VSCode fan) and, for the most part, it’s been worth it and my code has been the better for it. The analysis and linting is fantastic.
So far, the AI assistant in the EAP is one of the better AI integrations I’ve used in an IDE. I’ve used it for refactoring, simplification, generating XML doc comments, finding potential problems, but not much new code generation. I’ve also got Copilot, which mainly serves as a smarter autocomplete.
You do have to be careful - I’ve had it miss parameters on a refactor, but usually telling it “you missed parameter xyz” and it will correct it. But, hopefully, that’s just growing pains and it will improve.
Ah, I had wondered why I got a message from my PM that JetBrains products were now banned at my workplace. Time to go back to editing everything in Vim, I guess.
Just to clarify:
1) the AI Assistant plugin is not bundled, it needs to be installed separately;
2) once the plugin is installed, you need to explicitly log in to the AI platform.
Therefore, there's no risk of your code being submitted to a third-party service without you performing several explicit actions to authorize it.
To provide even more control over the use of AI Assistant at the organization level, we're adding support for per-repository opt-out flags in the next update of the AI Assistant plugin.
Besides what others have mentioned - I've always gotten an high quality response on the official forum by JetBrains representative within hours/days. Also their monthly to perpetual license is a great deal. I am currently using my personal license on my job.
The only issue I have their product is their feature parity. There is usually no timeline on when features from other product will be available on your product via an official plugin. For example, DataSpell has remote Jupyter notebooks feature before PyCharm Pro.
Well, some bugs are not fixed for many years. E.g. they do not support docker compose option `--project-directory`. It means that your docker compose files must always reside in the root directory of your project, otherwise PyCharm (or other JetBrains IDE) would fail to properly parse them and/or your project.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it breaks, it depends on your exact version of the IDE, but most of the time it doesn't work. And I find keeping all of my docker configuration in the root of the project cluttering the project, I prefer to keep them in the deploy, docker, or compose subdirectory.
The bug for this exists for many years with absolutely nothing being done about it. Maybe it's my personal pain but it is highly annoying.
Sometimes I'm so desperate that I wish to disassemble and patch this part of the IDE myself.
I find their git integration limited as well. When using git I always find myself using IDE's integrated terminal, or OS's terminal. But, I've reported bugs on their tracker - it took a while, but they fixed it.
Yep, but some of the bugs take years to fix. Some are fixed quickly, some are not fixed for years, and it doesn't always depend on bug severity. Long time ago there was an UI bug in the debugger that wasn't fixed for a long time, maybe like a year.
Although I admit that I rarely see serious bugs now. They were more frequent 10 years ago. Still, bugs with docker/docker compose integration remain and they are highly annoying to me since I almost exclusively develop in docker now. And it seems that docker integration has much less priority for evolution and bug fixing than other areas of JetBrains IDEs. In almost all new releases there's no bug fixes and improvements related to docker integration (and I try to browse their release announcements often).
As of git integration, for me there's almost everything I need. I even started to do rebase more often in the IDE rather than in command line.
Out of curiosity, which features do you lack? I use Rider professionally and I can't get myself to use vscode or terminal because of how good git integration is in IntelliJ.
Lets say you have added some file to the staging area using the IDE's Commit window. If you continue to modify those files after staging, commit window does not have any indicator to show these files have been updated further. I think the only way to figure it out it to run 'git status'.
Tightly integrated full-feature development environment.
- Don't have to fiddle with extensions, linters, debuggers, etcetc nearly as much (less of a problem depending which language you use, but still)
- Database viewer
- Git UI
- CLI
Doesn't cost much more than a few hours of work at an hourly rate, and saves a lot more time in not fiddling with your setup or having 5 different apps for everything.
Unless you're charging an intern level rate to your clients, it's reasonable to assume for a good chunk of the industry that the cost is alright. Even $15/hr would cover it in a day.
If you're using it in an employment environment, your employer should be footing the bill.
Not every post has to be hyper-specific with stats, charts and graphs.
> Why is the pricing tied to how much time it saves you
Because that's the value proposition over setting up and managing all the tools myself? Especially the core IDE portion.
The primary input of software is labour - i.e. time spent working. We stand on mountains of open source work that makes the job much faster and cheaper.
This labour cost is certainly also factored into costs in many other industries. The difference with software is that, largely speaking, the TCO goes way down if you only consider the software (and infrastructure) itself. Cloud infrastructure costs can get pricey but salaries will always be more expensive. So it makes sense to view things this way in software land when selling your time - and thus also how you view purchases that affect how you spend your time.
The time I saved because I don't need to double check if VSCode found all symbols while refactoring a large Angular app is worth multiple times the Jetbrains license...
That's actually the big difference, from my, and others [1], experience. Jetbrains is type aware, and code structure aware, so will refactor far beyond symbols.
I can move functions/classes, reorder/rename arguments of methods, move classes around, etc. Last I checked, this was very limited in vscode.
Interested in the ergonomics of this, it's more similar to GitHub Copilot Chat in VS Code, than regular Copilot. There's no autocomplete like in regular Copilot, so for new code I may end up using Copilot, and for refactoring I may end up using this.
Ex-PyCharm Pro user here, switched to VS Code about 3 years back. I’m very happy - and comfortable - with VS Code but sometimes do wonder what I’m missing.
Anyone else recently gone one way or the other and got some thoughts?
I moved from vscode to rubymine. Way more responsive and less memory hungry with many projects open. They are pretty similar now anyway with the new UI.
Also out-of-the-box lints for JS are so much better in JB.
There’s no reason to use vscode other than it’s free.
Even the first party plug-ins are disappointingly bad for all languages other than javascript.
Unless you’re heavily using js/ts, and lightly using another language, the vscode language support for many languages (in my personal experience, specifically python, c# and c) … it’s just bad.
It’s free. It’s great to get something like vscode for literally nothing, but if you’re not constrained by the (relatively trivial) cost of the JB products, there no meaningful reason to move over the vscode.
…but that isn’t new, and as both a pycharm and vscode user, it should come as no surprise.
So… nothing has meaningfully changed?
The new UI is vaguely annoying, but vscode like, if it makes any difference to you. The refactoring and autocomplete is categorically superior.
The vscode collaboration stuff is better than the half baked IntelliJ stuff, but it always was.
The vscode copilot plugin is better than the IntelliJ one, which is a bit flakey in its suggestions sometimes, and screws up the default autocomplete sometimes.
It still uses a lot of memory, but so does vscode once you load it up with plugins.
Eh, tldr; if you left for a reason, there’s probably no reason to come back.
I'm disappointed. Jetbrains is my daily IDE, and I don't really want to switch to something else at the moment, but this is such a huge red flag it is probably time to start looking.
My thinking is the community edition won't have this "feature".
I just cancelled my subscription and I'm downgrading. The only Ultimate feature I used was the database explorer which is replaceable.
Apart from anything else, this stuff just wastes my time and energy - I don't want to even have to think about the security implications - is my IDE - the main tool for my job spying on me? Is my project which I've spent many thousands developing being leaked somewhere?
Valuable code is battle tested and hardened over many iterations using human intelligence and discussion. It does not come from a LLM.
Christ. Between this and the flat UI update, I might just cancel my subscription and permanently switch to the 2022 versions.
I'm rather disappointed with the direction Jetbrains has been taking this year. I've been subscribed to the all products pack for a long time because the value was incredible. Now they're adding things I consider to be anti-features, and I'm just so uninterested in paying for that
This sounds intriguing but the alternative of Emacs + language servers + Mx-chat-gpt, etc. just works so well that even though I own a current JetBrians license, I don’t think I will spend the time for this.
Sometimes, tools are just good enough and it is better to work on projects that play with new tools.
Two big reasons:
1. It’s a distraction from developing a solid IDE. I’m already displeased with their obvious VSCode envy and the new UI, so focusing on shiny features makes me unhappy as a customer.
2. I don’t want AI assist, let alone “deeply integrated” AI assist. It is a security and privacy nightmare. As the article notes about the privacy policy, “Neither the user nor JetBrains has control over this third-party data processing.”
Perhaps I’m a Luddite, but I think tools like this and copilot are terrible, and I don’t want to be forced into them.
1. It’s a distraction from developing a solid IDE. I’m already displeased with their obvious VSCode envy and the new UI, so focusing on shiny features makes me unhappy as a customer.
I agree with you! I have had reasonable success in the past reporting bugs and getting them progressed via youtrack.jetbrains.com, but I have this lingering fear that less attention is being paid to that vs the exciting new features... I held my nose and paid for another year of subscription, but I'm not sure what I'll do next year. BTW, I love the phrase "obvious VSCode envy" :-) but I don't like what it portends :-(
They haven't had a "point-and-click adventure UI" for years. Pressing left Shift twice has been able to find ever single setting, button, code symbol, tool window, etc. since at least 2020.
I initially really disliked the new UI but since they trimmed the negative space around icons and even introduced a compact mode, I switched. My only dislike is that all buttons are monochrome.
Just to clarify: No one is forcing you to use AI assistance features. All the deeply integrated features start working only after you explicitly log in to JetBrains AI service.
I got some great advice when I first started coding / CS classes. "Skip Eclipse, use Dr. Java. Skip the intellisense and autocomplete at first so you can really learn". I've kept that mindset for all of my coursework and career. It has probably been the most impactful thing for my career. These AI assistants are the antithesis of this idea. Learn your tools and your codebase deeply, the easy things will be so easy you won't need the AI, the impossible things the AI could never do will be possible.
My thoughts too, it's like shooting yourself in the knee just so you can flex that you had it 'harder' but you managed. Like... what's the point. Being good at software development has nothing to do with knowing every single method of standard library, I have 7 years of experience and I regularly google how to init an array in the language I work in(just as an example).
