JetBrains Thinkrail

Posted by hmokiguess 3 days ago

Comments

Comment by exizt88 3 days ago

I refuse to take a repo with an AI-generated readme seriously. If you haven't bothered to write a readme, what else have you not bothered to do?

(100% AI according to Pangram btw)

Comment by NichoPaolucci 3 days ago

> the app owns the workspace, the editor, and the wire — it never assembles prompts behind your back.

Thanks JetBrains, I assumed the app would assemble prompts behind my back, so I'm glad they clarified that.

If they bothered reading this that would have been removed. I understand smaller players... Vibe Coders, Solo projects, something on its initial commit (to be edited / cleaned up / improved).

But, from JetBrains? Bad sign for the industry, IMO. Is it that fucking hard to have a decent technical writer collect some some human-readable documentation? This just exudes lack of effort.

Comment by zamalek 2 days ago

It probably came from some out of scope call out in the original prompt, or a redirect. I have found that AI really loves patting itself on the back like this.

Comment by slopnt 2 days ago

It really really loves mentioning what something "is not" right after it just said what it is. I don't like this pattern and see it more and more in READMEs, probably part of recent Claude RL. I don't think its as prevalent in the zeitgeist as the emdash, "Its not X its Y" and the emoji bullet list.

Comment by whatthejesus 3 days ago

If anything spend your time on the code and let AI make the readme. If you’re basing the code quality on the readme maybe look at the architecture is a better way to judge a project. Seems a bit superficial like judging a book by its cover…

Comment by fatata123 3 days ago

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Comment by monk_grilla 3 days ago

Such an idiotic take. You can't possibly have ever built anything yourself that you actually cared about. If you had, you would know what you're saying makes no sense at all.

Comment by whatthejesus 2 days ago

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Comment by GuB-42 3 days ago

It is an "agentic IDE", a tool intended for people who don't bother writing a readme.

If you care about these things you are either not the intended target or you are a hypocrite.

Comment by pjmlp 3 days ago

I refuse to take a repo with an AI-generated code seriously. If you haven't bothered to write the code, what else have you not bothered to do?

Comment by nicce 3 days ago

Some repo owners just review code that others submit, and don't write anything themselves. If the review process stays the same, does it matter? The fault is not generating the code with AI, rather, with faulty review process or not caring about the code, or not reading it. A different problem.

Comment by pjmlp 3 days ago

Others also submit readme updates.

Comment by viccis 3 days ago

"A pi session and the change it made, scoped to an isolated git-worktree workspace."

Yep. The "A $thing, $elaboration." has joined "$title. $thing, $past_verb." in my "this team didn't care enough to do a basic pass over the main page introducing their product" tells.

Comment by Quitschquat 2 days ago

README seems to be where $AGENT dumps some kind of context for itself. I've come to peace with that and instead create a Github page for user level shit.

Comment by stingraycharles 3 days ago

I'm more worried about all PRs being reviewed and accepted by AI as well.

Comment by MiroslavPokorny 3 days ago

Pft, im waiting for a twitter 144 character tweet which sends a link with the app to all followers.

Comment by hoppp 3 days ago

I am fine with AI readme as long as it has what I need.

Comment by quasarj 3 days ago

Not sure why it matters? I can't tell the difference, personally, but even if I could the AI is much more likely to have given complete and accurate information than any human..

Comment by vconnor 3 days ago

Do we have to explain in every bloody thread why human-generated Readmes, with their faults and omissions, are preferable to overly verbose and flowery AI slop prose?

Conciseness and highlighting relevant points is much more important than word count. Machine generated readmes are anything but. Sorry you can’t tell the difference between that and human prose, you should try reading more human content.

Comment by pjmlp 3 days ago

Yes, because apparently accepting the vibe generated junk code is alright, only the Readmes seems to be a problem.

Comment by hoppp 3 days ago

It really depends on the human input. Prompt the LLM to give a short but dense explanation.

Comment by rgoulter 3 days ago

> overly verbose and flowery AI slop prose

This is a useful criticism.

Left to themselves, LLMs prefer writing that's really atrocious. e.g. The writing will try and make everything sound profound.

The other problem I've noticed is e.g. LLMs will write in stuff that's inappropriate for the content of the text. e.g. Writing out stuff that looks like a chat reply, in commentary or descriptions or whatever.

I'd distinguish, though, between "sloppy writing" & "LLM generated writing". I'd agree if you didn't put in the effort to check the writing is of high quality, then perhaps the other parts are also not high quality.

I don't think just because "AI" wrote it it's bad. I wouldn't prefer e.g. sloppy human writing over well-crafted LLM-written text.

This readme the main thing which sticks out is the "what you get" bullet points are rather dense/verbose for bullet points. But aside from that it seems fine.

Comment by alexjameson 3 days ago

I'm a technical writer and I use agents a lot for my work and personal projects. I also created a basic open-source preset for agents to create end-user documentation.

During the preset testing, I created dozens of READMEs using agents. Although I can't say that any of them were perfect for me, most of them were good enough.

README is a very special kind of document. For small projects, it's often the only one that potential users will read. The README should explain what the product is, what problems it solves, how to get started, provide some examples, and explain the restrictions. It should cover all these topics in a concise way so that even readers who aren't used to read long texts can easily read through it. It's definitely up to human to make it clear and easy to understand.

Comment by spying_lg_tv 3 days ago

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Comment by smohare 3 days ago

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Comment by sergiotapia 3 days ago

there's no need to announce this. might as well announce you don't eat meat, or you don't like electricity.

Comment by asteroidburger 3 days ago

Why does AI-generated imply "not bothered" to you? If I take all of my design docs/specs, all of the existing repo, and I tell an agent that I'd like to make a readme that contains things X, Y, and Z, what's the problem?

Rejecting slop doesn't imply rejecting all AI-generated text wholesale.

Comment by sigotirandolas 3 days ago

> Why does AI-generated imply "not bothered" to you?

1. AI generated text is just hard to read and verbose, if you worked so hard on your docs/specs, why would you want your README to be unreadable?

2. There's so much garbage written with AI that I'm just going to assume yours also is. Would you sign up to a gym with broken windows? It could be the best gym ever, but I wouldn't count on it.

Comment by phoghed 3 days ago

> hard

Skill issue, it’s easy for a guy like me

Comment by bdangubic 3 days ago

there is a lot more garbage written by humans, you assume the same for humans?

Comment by JumpCrisscross 3 days ago

> what's the problem?

I can do it. Anyone can do it. Probably better for my/their own needs than someone else’s agent can.

The README is meant to communicate substance and intent. Without the latter it’s an overly-verbose landing page.

Comment by TiredOfLife 3 days ago

I can see. Anyone can see.

Comment by davidbanham 3 days ago

If it wasn’t important enough for someone to take the time to write, it isn’t important enough for me to take the time to read.

Comment by hoppp 3 days ago

This is true. I think generated code really shines as internal tooling and not something shared.

Comment by MiroslavPokorny 3 days ago

Whats my favourite ice cream ?

The answer is very short.

But given you dont know me, im going to guess you wont be foolish enough to try and guess especially considering there are at least 100 different flavours.

Software is even more complicated. How is any person even the smartest software type in the world or AI going to know all the exact details of your wish if nobody tells them exactly every painful detail ?

Comment by vconnor 3 days ago

Why does AI-generated imply "not bothered" to you? If I am not bothered to write the content, so I ask the agent to do it for me, what’s the problem?

Comment by davidbanham 3 days ago

The fact that you didn't feel it was worth your time to make sure it was excellent is a strong signal that I shouldn't bother to read it.

Comment by troupo 3 days ago

Because AI-generated README means that the person doesn't care about the audience. It means that the author never read the README themselves to see that the "load-bearing ground truths" actually reflect what the project is about, and not some hallucinated bullshit.

There's a famous Jobs story in which he insisted that even the insides of the computers be made beautiful. Because that shows care. Now people are arguing that even the outsides can be as ugly as they want, who cares.

Comment by ChrisClark 3 days ago

What if they read it and concluded it was correct?

Comment by JumpCrisscross 3 days ago

> What if they read it and concluded it was correct?

Then I’ll probably hear about it again from someone I trust. I don’t need to be the first in my circle to test if this one is different.

Comment by davidbanham 3 days ago

It may be correct, but was it good? If it's obvious that someone has plopped some slop in that file and then said "Yeah that'll do, ship it", then that gives the reader information about how much the author cared about the project. If someone's first touchpoint to your project is a billboard that yells "I DIDN'T REALLY GIVE A TOSS ABOUT THIS" then don't be shocked if they don't engage.

Comment by matkoniecz 3 days ago

If they read it and were fine with blatant llmese, then I do not trust their review abilities at all.

Comment by user43928 3 days ago

We all know AI does not write well today.

What JetBrains needs is nothing short of a revolutionary product, which they would need to sell with an excellent introduction.

Instead they phoned it in and pasted that slop:

> Once a GitHub PR is open it shows the CI checks and review decision, and lets you mark it ready, hand failing checks or a diverged branch to the agent, merge it with the repository's last-used method, reopen it, or delete the remote branch.

Comment by FridgeSeal 3 days ago

The problem is that it’s market or care and respect. If you can’t even be bothered to while a simple readme communication your intentions, what else can’t you be bothered doing properly?

It’s a marker that the project is likely to be low-effort slop, which may or may not just be abandoned at the deep of a hat.

Comment by matkoniecz 3 days ago

> Why does AI-generated imply "not bothered" to you?

If it is blatant unfixed llmese, then it means that no effort whatsoever was put into making this text.

Comment by cebert 3 days ago

> I refuse to take a repo with an AI-generated readme seriously.

Well, good luck in professional development then. Love it or hate it, this is the way everything is moving.

Comment by vehemenz 3 days ago

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Comment by tasuki 3 days ago

> I refuse to take a repo with an AI-generated readme seriously. If you haven't bothered to write a readme, what else have you not bothered to do?

I care whether the readme is any good, not who wrote it. If you haven't bothered to critique the readme and instead critique its suspected creator — something entirely in your head — what else have you not bothered to do?

> (100% AI according to Pangram btw)

So what? Who cares about Pangram? I certainly don't! You cannot detect AI — it's impossible. Perhaps it's just Kenyans?[0]

[0]: https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...

Comment by maxdo 3 days ago

majority of people here, have to read ai for work. that's why you're getting paid nowadays, read, understand, steer and fix errors produced by ai. this is an ai product. It's a bit weird why readme of ai product has to be written by human?

Comment by chenzhekl 3 days ago

The README looks clear to me. What do you think went wrong?

Comment by smallnix 3 days ago

But why read it? Just point your agent at it and use your personalized project exploration skill.

Comment by dr_faustus 3 days ago

I’ve been using JetBrains IDEs for over a decade but rarely open them anymore because working on several worktrees concurrently is extremely frustrating and wasteful. Their AI strategy is all over the place and they always wanted to sell their opaque and overpriced tokens, which made no sense. I hope they get their act together.

Comment by cdmckay 3 days ago

I canceled my subscription after like 12 years because I realized all the things that made it great aren’t really needed anymore. The “it just works” tooling, refactoring, jumping around code, etc.

Now my agents mainly write code under my direction and I review it either in the harness or on GitHub.

I hadn’t opened it in ages and when I did need an IDE something like Zed was more than sufficient.

Comment by NBJack 3 days ago

Part of what I've loved about JetBrians tools has been the navigation and deep semantics for large code bases. Zed is pretty basic in that regard. My agents usually get what I need, but when they go off the rails, cleanup gets interesting.

But I'll admit to keep my skills from atrophying, there are some projects of mine I don't touch with AI.

Comment by XorNot 3 days ago

Code review is the problem I'm currently trying to figure out for myself. I've never liked GitHub PRs but I'm not 100% sure what I want instead (which is possibly just: it feels like it should be a VS Code plugin... But maybe I don't like VS Codes interface that much either?)

Comment by sa46 3 days ago

IntelliJ supports pretty decent GitHub code review in the editor. It shows the modified code in the gutter and review comments.

I use it when I need to deeply understand a PR.

Comment by el_blargos 3 days ago

Trying linear those days. I love it as a ticket system. And PR just showed up... I will review in there for a while

Comment by Deukhoofd 3 days ago

Yeah, their worktree implementation was very recently hacked in, and it really doesn't work well. The IDE project list duplicate entries for every worktree, IDE project settings don't transfer across worktrees, and every time I switch to another worktree it asks me again what project I want to open, instead of just opening the same solution I have opened.

It's wild that a set of IDEs that are generally fairly good just completely fail in this basic workflow. I really wonder what went through the minds of the product owners and developers that implemented this.

Comment by kowbell 3 days ago

I also have to work in multiple workspaces simultaneously, and it drives me up the wall every time one of my IDE windows freezes (sometimes even just from inserting a Tab), because now ALL of them are frozen.

Comment by gwerbin 3 days ago

I thought so too until I learned that there is a dedicated worktree switcher hidden away as a tab in the GitHub pain. Now I can open each worktree in a separate window as if it were its own project. Maybe that's not everyone's ideal work though, but it's exactly what I want 99% of the time.

But I don't use it for AI assistant development, it's definitely meant for humans and not AI agents.

Comment by quantiq 3 days ago

Their AI implementations are an absolute mess.

I know because I've tried practically all of their AI product offerings and not a single one feels coherent.

Comment by sumedh 3 days ago

Been a paid user for a very long time but now Claude Code and Codex do the job, dont need Jetbrains anymore.

I just could not understand their AI strategy.

Comment by anigbrowl 3 days ago

Same. I like their products but they have a problem with feature creep and design debt, and their AI tools are extremely in your face while also being underwhelming. I don't know if I'm going to renew my subscriptions.

Comment by andix 3 days ago

I disabled all the AI tools in my JetBrains IDEs. They suddenly feel so much better. Less intrusive completions, suggestions and better performance.

An IDE still has it's uses, and it's perfectly fine without AI. Agents and IDEs have never felt like something that should be combined in my opinion.

Comment by anigbrowl 2 days ago

I'm inclined to agree. Jetbrains' own agent host 'Junie' was such a paim to set up and get working with other providers that I switched to Cline. I had moderately good results with using that as a coding agent, but eventually I switched to Deepseek Harness for generative tasks and am now using my IDEs more for review.

Comment by andix 1 day ago

Never used their agent. They added a lot of completions and smart features into the editor. I never got along well with that. I've reverted to static completions now, like before AI. It made the editor less distracting, more performant and much more predictable to use.

If I edit code I know what I want to edit. If I want AI to do it, I prompt an agent.

Comment by GuB-42 3 days ago

Like pretty much every traditional tech company, it looks like JetBrains is looking at the AI bubble and panics. They feel like they have to do something, anything, and quickly, when, at least in my opinion, they should take it slowly, capitalize on what they do well and progressively integrate AI where it really makes sense, rather than jumping on the (already crowded) vibe coding bandwagon.

Hopefully, all these companies will go back to reason in a few years, when the bubble will burst. By bubble bursting, I don't mean that AI will disappear, but the nonsense and crazy money around it will.

Comment by nimchimpsky 3 days ago

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Comment by Deukhoofd 3 days ago

Didn't JetBrains release JetBrains Air recently? This looks like it's basically the same basic premise, except implemented differently. What's their strategy here, are they just launching competing products?

https://www.jetbrains.com/air/

Comment by saghm 3 days ago

They also started developing Fleet several years back and made a few alpha releases, only to shutter it before it ever was ever fully released for reasons that essentially seemed to boil down to "we want to focus on our core IDEs instead, which didn't really explain what changed. I was interested in Fleet, so at this point I can't help but be skeptical of anything new they've done since then because it's not clear to me why the same logic for discontinuing Fleet couldn't apply to pretty much anything else.

Comment by shepherdjerred 3 days ago

Fleet was tragic. I was so excited for it but it was a perpetual WIP.

I suppose they were in a tough spot regardless though. They started developing it before the AI age, so they would have to pivot either way.

Comment by nicce 3 days ago

I even forgot that it exist. I tried it many times but it was not good enough. Eventually I switched to Zed since that was better. Probably Zed killed it.

Comment by xentripetal 3 days ago

To my knowledge, fleet is Air. They just renamed it and started adding more AI centric workflows.

Comment by 0rzech 2 days ago

You're right, AFAIK.

Comment by saghm 1 day ago

Huh, I went back to look at the announcement of halting development on Fleet, and they went back and updated it six months after the fact to announce the rebrand. It never occurred to me to go back and look.

Comment by usef- 3 days ago

Many of the improvements and refreshed design were "backported" into the traditional IDEs.

And fleet was made to attract the VSCode generation, who they were starting to lose new user momentum to. But VSCode is no longer the biggest threat.

Comment by saghm 3 days ago

> Many of the improvements and refreshed design were "backported" into the traditional IDEs.

Okay, but what stops any of that for happening for any of the new things since then? To me, a large part of the appeal of Fleet was that it wasn't the entire IDE; adding a new skin to something that feels much too heavyweight for me does not resolve the fundamental problems I had with it.

Comment by usef- 3 days ago

Oh, I agree it's not ideal. But the kind of people who were willing to move to a new IDE are also the people who will now be first to ditch IDEs completely. The people who stuck to their traditional IDEs are likely the ones paying subscriptions.

I actually think they could do something more radical than Fleet today after seeing the (alpha, but impressive in use) ArtCraft apps, and translations like Bun. They could embrace still being the best traditional IDE, translating their trademark intelligence, with a lot of the heaviness removed. The thing that struck me about the ArtCraft apps was how fast and light their interfaces felt compared to the originals.

Comment by Deukhoofd 3 days ago

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Comment by crummy 3 days ago

At a guess, they are uncertain about the long term financial viability of selling their full IDEs, and development is cheap, so they are throwing up what they can to see what sticks, and will kill what doesn’t.

Comment by XorNot 3 days ago

The trouble is that's doomsday anyway. When I don't use most of the features of your product, you're competing with the monthly cost of my Claude subscription for value - and that's very good at building me exactly what I want.

Comment by smokel 3 days ago

It seems that Air is a strategic product, and Thinkrail is more of an experiment.

While they are both "agentic development tools", it seems that Air is mostly concerned with managing multiple agents, whereas Thinkrail is about spec-first development.

Comment by nsonha 3 days ago

I think they said they will discontinue Air, it currently supports codex and claude as harness as opposed to pi, and own UI lib (this one seems web/electron based), shame.

Comment by quantiq 3 days ago

> I think they said they will discontinue Air

That doesn't exactly inspire confidence that this product will stick around.

Comment by nsonha 3 days ago

sorry just double checked what I said, it wasn't true, no such announcement. I misremembered

Comment by JumpCrisscross 3 days ago

Who is naming this stuff…

Comment by sgt 3 days ago

JetBrains Air somehow makes me think of AirBrains

Comment by JumpCrisscross 3 days ago

Airheads. JetBrains Thinkrail goes in a different direction. (Though a precedented one, e.g. Ruby on Rails.)

Comment by throwaw12 3 days ago

It feels like JetBrains is dying, and they're trying very hard to survive.

I liked their products. Also, personally I am not seeing next level devexp yet, other than just using my agents for everything

Comment by SkyPuncher 3 days ago

They're too hung up on their next product being more of the same.

They'd honestly do well just to pick one of the open harnesses, aquihire their team and start from their

Comment by bluerooibos 3 days ago

Right. Look at Opencode, OpenChamber, Cursor - that's the direction they need to go in, and like yesterday.

The only reason I keep Rubymine open these days is out of habit and I still like using it's git UI but there's less reason to do that every day. It's also a total RAM hog. JetBrains - please, make a lightweight, chat first IDE like everyone else is doing.

Comment by dozerly 3 days ago

It seems very likely that they are looking at cratering usage statistics and panicking.

Comment by le-mark 3 days ago

This is (would be) a convincing signal of ai adoption. Worth pondering I think.

Comment by troupo 3 days ago

It's interesting to see that the README is much less CLAUDE-y than the abomination that currently runs at https://thinkrail.ai/

Also, reading through their "SPECS".... https://github.com/JetBrains/thinkrail/blob/d299f20d2ba014f3... or https://github.com/JetBrains/thinkrail/blob/d299f20d2ba014f3...

How is this llm-vomit "specs that are ground truth" etc.?

Comment by woadwarrior01 3 days ago

The README has plenty of Claude-isms too.

Comment by sigotirandolas 3 days ago

My take: I don't see the point of those new-IDEs. They are mostly just worktrees+sandbox+tabs+prompts, which is just git+docker+tmux+thinking, but if you actually learn to use those tools instead of handcuffing your agents to whatever take the IDE has, you're going to be much happier and effective.

(That's also why there are so many of them: It just isn't that hard, everyone feels like a genius when they figure it out, and it's a great way to resume-build in the AI era).

Comment by sooheon 3 days ago

IDE's are also "just" text editing + code intelligence + project metadata + keybinds... we've had decades of iteration on them because good interfaces take time and effort to mature

Comment by dozerly 3 days ago

It’s a shape that gained adoption and so now everyone is jumping into that solution space instead of innovating.

We are due for another innovator that adds a net new, valuable facet to the development experience soon.

Comment by VMG 3 days ago

It feels like the day after I got comfortable with jj everybody become obsessed with git worktrees

Comment by mpalmer 3 days ago

The latest version of jj supports colocated git worktrees as part of its workspaces feature.

Comment by phildenhoff 3 days ago

Finally!! Can’t wait for git lfs support to land, and I can move back to mostly using jj

Comment by IshKebab 3 days ago

Are they just going to copy LFS? That's a real shame. I had some hope they would do something that isn't as shit. Oh well.

I guess they'll just copy submodules too. Kind of feels like there's little point using it if it's just going to copy Git's mistakes.

Comment by nicce 3 days ago

What are the benefits of jj if in the end everything is still on git backend?

Comment by yoz-y 3 days ago

To me the main difference is that there is no staging (so no stashing needed), and conflicts are first class citizens. In practice this means that you can usually halt your work halfway, switch a commit, rebase everything onto head and continue working even if one of the branches off your commit has conflicts. In git you would have to resolve those before the rebase can finish.

Since conflict resolution these days mostly boils down to “hey LLM, resolve conflicts” this is much nicer.

Also jj tracks every change to the repo so undo works much better and is more readable than reflog

Comment by saghm 3 days ago

My favorite feature is the built-in distinction between what's mutable and what's immutable in my history. I can freely modify any commits I make locally without issue, since no one else would be able to depend on them, but if I push something or fetch it from a coworker, I have the safety of not needing to be careful when doing the equivalent of an amend or rebase because it will fail with an error telling me to use a flag to bypass the immutability protection if that's what I actually want.

Not having to stage changes in lieu of them automatically getting picked up was a bit of a learning curve for me, but now that I've gotten used to it I like it a lot better and I don't think I could go back. The equivalent of the reflog pretty much always has my changes in it if I accidentally lose them without manually saving due to the snapshotting, and I have no need for a stash because commits and branches are essentially just recording a checkpoint rather than being things that feel "heavyweight".

As an added bonus, dealing with conflicts is a lot less annoying because each commit records its conflicts separately, so fixing them doesn't require doing a stateful pipeline of changes in a big rebase; I can just do them piecemeal, in any order I want, and even just check out other stuff and work on them before coming back later if I feel like it.

I was "that guy" who would sometimes have coworkers come for help with git problems (https://xkcd.com/1597/ alt text). I've forgotten most of that knowledge (and all of that muscle memory) and didn't have to learn nearly as much to replace it with the ability to do a lot more with a lot fewer mistakes.

Comment by sunshowers 3 days ago

It is more powerful and easier to use, for both humans and agents.

Comment by saghm 3 days ago

I didn't even realize those were recent! The first time I tried to look for how to use worktrees in jj, they were already available

Comment by shepherdjerred 3 days ago

I started using jj right when agents became viable. If I were still actually writing code rather than directing agents I would use it day-to-day

I don't think harness like Claude Code or Codex support jj very well for working in parallel

Comment by rOOb85 3 days ago

What’s jj in this context?

Comment by rumblefrog 3 days ago

Jujutsu - https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj

Comment by hn8726 3 days ago

It's a wrapper around git, compatible with git repos but supposedly easier to use

Comment by sunshowers 3 days ago

No, jj is not a wrapper around git. It is a source control system of its own that has git as one of at least two production backends. This distinction matters because git wrappers don't tend to have fundamental concepts of their own like the operation and evolution logs.

Comment by shepherdjerred 3 days ago

jj is in practice a wrapper around Git

it is built, though, that the Git backend can be swapped for another backend.

I'm not sure where you're getting two production backends from. I guess you're referring to the Google internal one that nobody can use?

> There is currently only one production-ready builtin commit backend: the Git backend. <omitted> Google also has its own cloud-based backend.

https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/glossary/?utm_source=chatgpt....

Comment by sunshowers 3 days ago

> jj is in practice a wrapper around Git

No, git-branchless is a wrapper around Git. jj is an independent source control system with git compatibility. jj can, and does, function entirely without git.

> I'm not sure where you're getting two production backends from. I guess you're referring to the Google internal one that nobody can use?

Lots of people within Google use it!

Comment by shepherdjerred 3 days ago

Yes, if you are lucky enough to work at Google you don't need Git to use jj. Most people do not work at Google.

If you work at Google, jj can and does function without Git.

If you do not work at Google, jj is a Git wrapper.

Comment by 3 days ago

Comment by collimarco 3 days ago

Running agents outside containers seems crazy to me... It should at least launch a sperate microVM or container for each agent / task.

Comment by TehCorwiz 3 days ago

So this looks like it's based on VSCode instead of their typical engine. I have complex feelings about that. I actually like their engine.

BTW, what's "InnovationHub" it's mentioned but I can't find a good link or explanation.

Overall it just looks like an experimental direction for IDE dev. I'd prefer they leaned into native dev like Zed though.

Comment by hkchad 3 days ago

The problem with all the AI IDE's is you can't use them with most enterprise/teams accounts, you have to use API which can cost upto to 10x more over an enterprise plan. I really like JetBrains, used them for a LONG time, but just find myself doing 99% of my day to day with iterm and sublime now.

Comment by tiku 3 days ago

Jetbrains using vs code is really sad.

Comment by quantiq 3 days ago

Not even using their own core engine is genuinely bleak.

Comment by aliasxneo 3 days ago

I'd have to be _strongly_ convinced to leave oh-my-pi and Paseo.

Comment by InsideOutSanta 3 days ago

Yeah, now that agents are doing most of the work, and we want to give them as much freedom as possible to run code, take screenshots, click on things, etc, it really doesn't make much sense to have a setup where all of this happens on your local computer. IMO it makes more sense to have this hosted somewhere, and then have UIs that make this visible to you on your devices.

Comment by aliasxneo 3 days ago

Exactly. They sit in their little world in my homelab and I control everything through networking and virtualization restrictions. They run on a beefy VM, can spawn their own VMs (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch, Windows, even macOS on an old mac mini), run their own browsers, access their own secrets, etc. There's no way I would go back to agentic development on my local machine anymore.

Comment by cromka 3 days ago

Any good writeup on how to set this up? Not that it's a rocket science, but would be good to have a bootstrap how to with good practices and a general showcase.

Comment by aliasxneo 3 days ago

Not that I can find. I'm a Senior SRE so it's more or less an extension of my domain. The hardest part is really just knowing the "best" way to do something which generally just comes from experience. But most frontier agents can probably get you close enough without too much experience.

Comment by simpaticoder 3 days ago

This sounds like a short-term strategy at best You only need an agent to click things long enough to build an API on top of the thing it's clicking on. And running a full windowed virtual machine is expensive!

I'd also caution against saying things like llms are doing most of the work I don't think that's true. And where it is true it shouldn't be. These things are still new tech and they need a lot of hand holding and oversight still.

Comment by InsideOutSanta 2 days ago

> You only need an agent to click things long enough to build an API on top of the thing it's clicking on

To be clear, it clicks things to do things like test software. If you build an API, you're not testing if the clicking actually works.

Comment by spying_lg_tv 3 days ago

[dead]

Comment by dr_kiszonka 3 days ago

I am curious about Pi, but my experience with a seemingly more fully-featured Hermes has been endless tinkering and fixing minor issues. Have your experience been at all similar?

Comment by aliasxneo 3 days ago

I've been using it without thinking much about it for 3 months now. Have yet to run into any bugs or strange behaviors. But bear in mind I'm using oh-my-pi, not Pi. I found the latter to be mostly useless in terms of what I needed for my day to day work. I'm sure I could tinker with it to get it right, but that's literally what oh-my-pi is doing for you. And like I said, zero problems thus far.

Comment by cromka 3 days ago

Do you use Paseo as a layer over oh-my-pi or alongside?

Comment by mcrowder65 3 days ago

Paseo!! :goat:

Comment by johnhamlin 3 days ago

Still rooting for these guys

Comment by photios 3 days ago

Interested in the SPEC.md format and workflow. Where can I learn more?

EDIT: found it at https://thinkrail.ai/blog/thinkrail-sdd/

---

Also... why bun?! I just finished purging it from all my systems, ha! It'd be cool to have plain pnpm support.

Comment by slopnt 2 days ago

bun was probably proposed by an LLM whose training preceded August 20

Comment by rcr-anti 3 days ago

I've been subscribed to Jetbrains full product pack for years now, but nowadays the thing I want more than anything is either a convergence of all their IDEs via plugins or a lighter universal editor like Fleet was getting close to. Agents let me work with languages I had no business with before, but now it isn't unusual to have RustRover, Rider, Webstorm, and Intellij open at the same time. Alternatively, I'm curious as to whether their code intelligence over MCP helps coding agents. If they did, I'd still pay for good code intelligence even if it was a headless MCP server. Thought they were going that way with Air, until they killed it yet again. Air is a plugin now, but that's back to the specific IDE thing.

Comment by rovr138 3 days ago

> but nowadays the thing I want more than anything is either a convergence of all their IDEs via plugins

I've been using Intellij IDEA lately.

I have pycharm, phpstorm, goland still installed and use them every now and then. I, however, spend a lot more time in claude code in the cli and main I'm reviewing.

I go to the specific ide when I need to debug heavily something or when I'm starting out to create a base. I don't like the structure that claude code sometimes comes up with, so I like starting it out and then it follows the pattern.

Comment by spockz 3 days ago

Intelligence is a paid product so I cannot test it. I would say that code intelligence and proper refactoring support instead of scratching around what agents do now is the direct next step for IntelliJ.

And probably something to understand what your agents are doing and why. With which reasoning.

Otherwise also stay a damn good IDE. We still need that. My agents are floundering on our bigger codebases and only produce warts.

Comment by jwpapi 3 days ago

NGL Jetbrains has massively helped my developer journey and be a great tool for many many years. I don’t open it that often anymore, but I see that they’re trying hard to stay relevant, which is probably not easy as probably the whole market moved against you.

So I’m willing to give it a try.

Comment by tylerritchie 3 days ago

yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50219186

Comment by theptip 3 days ago

Hmm, most of this seems like it would be cutting edge in 2025. And why do I want to use Monaco? If I’m in the JetBrains ecosystem isn’t it because I prefer their IDEs over VSCode?

The versioned and linked spec feature sounds somewhat interesting though.

Comment by fellowniusmonk 3 days ago

This is moving in the direction towards a final interface, very good.

There aren't enough digital french cleat systems.

The true benefit of a French cleat isn't storage or organizing the way a fiddly pegboard and hanger approach uses, it's the ability to move all tools for a specific project onto a single rail without having to fiddle around, reducing friction for engaging and re-engaging with a project.

Comment by owl_might_ 3 days ago

Just out of curiosity, what is a French cleat? I've only found references to building (real) shelves on Google.

Comment by Jtsummers 3 days ago

That's what it is, it's basically two boards with angled cuts to match. One mounted to the wall, the other to the thing you want to hang from the wall. No fasteners needed other than for those two attachments (or more if you use more boards). Gives you some flexibility in arranging things in a shop (or, that's my reason for using it with our 2-car garage).

Comment by owl_might_ 3 days ago

I misunderstood the original message, seem's like my English isn't that good. Thanks for taking the time to explain!

Comment by syngrog66 3 days ago

I saw an estimate that as of 2022 Jetbrains employeed at least 2000 or 3000 Russians, and I'm curious how much that number has shrunk since, and then what percentage ended up also working on their AI/LLM related features. Not taken close look at that repo yet.

Comment by lousken 3 days ago

Where is local model support and just any openai compatible api support? Pi agent is compatible with more stuff

Comment by thinkindie 3 days ago

I've been working on a similar concept, around claude code, for my own productivity https://github.com/bits4breakfast/albedo

Comment by surgical_fire 3 days ago

As a Pi user, this may be very interesting. Especially after they add full support for Pi extensions.

I tried Air before and found it underwhelming. I tried using it around Pi through ADB, but it didn't any benefit around using Pi purely.

Comment by dangoodmanUT 3 days ago

It's nice to see JetBrains finally wake up and realize they can't sell a Cursor competitor from 2024 anymore. Something about JetBrains writing a new IDE seems bold... not sure if it feels correct.

Comment by mstaoru 3 days ago

At this point they should rename into just "Jet".

Comment by comrade1234 3 days ago

So is this DOA? I use IntelliJ for work every day and I have a project that will work for agentic coding but that I want to experiment with...

Comment by ChrisArchitect 3 days ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50219186

Comment by febed 3 days ago

I find myself switching between claude, codex, pi etc. I see that this project only monitors pi sessions which is a shame.

Comment by rfgplk 3 days ago

> TypeScript followed by a myriad other (objectively) slow languages

JetBrains, explain concisely why this isn't written in C/C++/Rust?

Comment by yoyohello13 3 days ago

Very likely because Pi is written in TypeScript and Pi plugins are expected to be TS. TS is becoming the one true language. Best get used to it.

Comment by troupo 3 days ago

Because it's just slapping web-based Monaco editor on top of pi which is written in Typescript.

Comment by eviks 3 days ago

What makes the core IDE so bad that it requires using all the new ones instead of improving/extending the core?

Comment by outlore 3 days ago

My reaction to AI generated websites and READMEs: I ain’t reading all of that - but happy for you, or sorry it happened

Comment by ivanb 3 days ago

Funny thing is, it is now viable to vibecode your own bespoke IDE. What I pretty much did.

Comment by arikrahman 3 days ago

I cannot express how happy I am that it uses a Pi core. Look forward to complementing herdr with this

Comment by bikelang 3 days ago

It’s an absolute shame that they’re using Monaco as their editor for this. Shocking, even. I wish they would have used the editor they built for Fleet. Monaco just feels like the lowest common denominator editor UI and isn’t nearly as polished as what you get from say Zed or a full fat Jetbrains IDE.

I’ve been using Orca as my agent orchestrator du jour - but its editor experience is just pathetic. Really what I want is Zed integrated into a similar all-in-one platform like Orca (but more minimal - Orca is a total slopshow with way too many features)

Comment by zbentley 3 days ago

Have you tried T3? It seems more session-oriented than IDE-oriented, but I keep seeing folks who use/like it. Maybe one of these days I'll give it a try.

Comment by zahrevsky 3 days ago

> We built a rich interface around the pi coding agent

This is exactly what I was missing

Comment by 1Bad 3 days ago

Ah this reminds me I need to cancel my jetbrains subscription. I started with CLion and used RustRover, PyCharm, WebStorm, DataGrip over the years but now they all feel outdated and unnecessary.

Edit: oh shit I am on the cancel screen and reminded I also used ReSharper. Best of luck jetbrains I have given you a lot of money figure your shit out and I would happily return.

Comment by docheinestages 3 days ago

JetBrains simply can't accept that IDEs are dying.

Comment by MBCook 3 days ago

Boy people in here are super negative.

Comment by hsuduebc2 3 days ago

This is a great step. JetBrains integration of AI agents inside their ides is horrendously clunky.

Comment by tclancy 3 days ago

I have multiple CLAUDE.md instructions about why using the terminal in JetBrains will burn the agent badly.

Comment by WesleyJohnson 3 days ago

Can you expand on this? I genuinely don't know and I use claude code in a terminal in PyCharm daily.

Comment by tclancy 3 days ago

It's probably sorted, but for a while there was an escaping issue. Then our company forced us to use Claude via CoPilot in PyCharm and that may have been the other issue. I just stick to a command prompt in a shell now unless there's a pressing advantage to doing it in any IDE.

Comment by 3 days ago

Comment by yoyohello13 3 days ago

Looks interesting, but they need to clean up the claudese in those bullet points holy crap. It's like they purposely want the "what you get" section to be as obtuse as possible.

Comment by bbtalk 3 days ago

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Comment by qcarlisle 3 days ago

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Comment by pang_claw 2 days ago

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Comment by oDot 3 days ago

I do not get the appeal of web-based GUIs now that we have LLMs.

Migrating my screenwriting software[0] from OpenTUI to Roc thought me what were once rough edges that take a lot of time are now just a prompt away from a solution.

It now uses 10x less RAM, bundle is half the size, and my initial implementation is 700-800 fps for scrolling and 200 fps for writing.

Granted, a TUI is less complex than a full-blown GUI, but I built a Roc Iced platform just as easily that abstracted Iced flux away

[0]: https://blisswriter.app/

Comment by Aurornis 3 days ago

JetBrains UIs aren't web-based, unless this is an exception.

JetBrains tools are heavier and can take a few seconds to launch, but they also have some of the most responsive typing out there. They did some good work on zero-latency typing modes when that was a big topic and they were very good at typing latency relative to most editors.

They will never be the right tool for the personality type that gets angry when their IDE takes a few seconds to launch at the beginning of the day or when an application takes more than 1GB of RAM, but I am not that type of person so I enjoy them.

I think the TUI people are well served by vim or emacs and should just stay there and be happy.

The rest of your post feels like an injected ad for your project underneath a topic where it's not relevant

Comment by oDot 3 days ago

This post is about a TypeScript repo, which is what I commented on. It may as well be a necessity since Pi is using a JS runtime as well. It has nothing to do with JetBrains and everything to do with the codebase in the link.

It also has nothing to do with TUI vs. GUI, since my comment addressed both (anecdotally).

If anything, your mentioning of their performance work is exactly my point.

Comment by someothherguyy 3 days ago

for people who still code. why do you need them not to?

Comment by oDot 3 days ago

I do code -- the app logic. I also am well aware of what the infrastructure code does, I just don't type any of it myself.

Even if I wanted not to code it I couldn't. LLMs are still incapable of creating code up to any decent standard.

Also, while I do the get the joy of programming, we sometimes forget to focus on the user. You being happy to have typed the whole thing once, and have it run everywhere via the magic of browsers may not be the best strategy if this means your user's lap will be overheating.

In the end as much as I like coding I would prefer my users' experience to be the best it can be. LLM assisted code delivers this better and faster than hand-typing it all (which in turn is better than completely vibecoding it)

Comment by 14u2c 3 days ago

Jetbrains software is not web-based.

Comment by gjvc 3 days ago

teamcity, youtrack, ...

Comment by reisse 3 days ago

Eh, have you checked the repo? Thinkrail is Typescript + Bun + Electrobun, and UI is written in React, which is pretty much web stack.

Comment by 14u2c 3 days ago

I should have done so, that’s unfortunate. Doesn’t bode well for their Java stack.

Comment by 3 days ago