Posted by FinnLobsien 6 hours ago
They had the best IDE. Now they went all into AI, trying to compete on another people's field, and the cost of that is diminishing their main product. Do they really want to compete with Anthropic? Instead of that they could improve the other sides of IDE. Even with AI I have to review the code. Especially with AI. I need tools to check the diffs, I need to refactor it, I need to run it in different ways, see how it works, and so on. That's where IntelliJ could shine, not as AI tool.
It's clearly existential for JetBrains, and it's revealing that the opening goes for the fear with "but it hasn’t changed what it costs to be wrong" while ignoring that this hasn't exactly been a major concern for most software people for a scarily long time, including JetBrains themselves.
I couldn't find how to change the mode without it trying to use Junie, or claude etc. very frustrating.
Two things that fell short for me:
1. No support for my Claude subscription
2. The git interface lags behind other JetBrains IDEs
About point 1: We tried to make this work, but unfortunately hit a hard stop with Anthropic: their current policies do not allow us to support this integration, and we were not able to negotiate an exception :c
We still hope that we will find an agreement here
1) Import of historical data from agents. I often look up past agent sessions and require search into them as a primary feature of the harness. I know for a fact that historical conversations are not encrypted for both Codex and Cursor on a local filesystem, so Intellij tool could import them into ai assistance plugin even before user is authenticated with either Cursor or Codex. There are few annoying things in search for both Cursor and Codex extensions, so having great search over past conversations could be a great introductory feature
2) Auth .. I am not sure about this one technically because I haven't looked myself into how agent auth is done for Cursor and Codex, but at least for Codex, their IDE extension for vscodium/cursor/zed/etc. is able to use existing authentication from the CLI codex tool, so I do not need to login into every new IDE I try Codex extension in. With Intellij Codex auth did not work at all for me.
3) Cursor authentication worked, though I needed second one for Intellij while being logged in with CLI, but the model reasoning level is not selectable from within ai assistant, one more deal breaker for me unfortunately (I found it stays like this for a long time: https://forum.cursor.com/t/intellij-cursor-acp-reasoning-lev...)