[surrTurr]

JetBrains is WAY behind VS-Code and its forks (e.g. Cursor) in terms of AI features.

Their own offering, "Jetbrains AI" absolutely SUCKS (just read the reviews, you'll see why).

Third-party AI plugins are pretty basic. Most just offer inline completions and a chat sidebar. For example, GitHub Copilot for Intellij is a shell of itself: No agent capabilities, or even model switching (although that seems to be coming in a future update).

Generally speaking, Jetbrains seems to have missed the AI code editor revolution, and are now trying to play catch-up. The problem is that their plugin API seems to offer less capabilities than VS-Code when it comes to implementing advanced AI features (think of cursor like features). This, combined with the fact that Intellij products are closed source and can't simply be forked by someone who requires additional capabilities, makes it hard for third parties to build advanced AI features.

PS: I also tested their new "Agent" plugin called Junie (invite only beta). It's really basic (like 30% as good as cursors agent mode), but since it's still in invite only beta this should be taken with a grain of salt.

[kuschku]

> This, combined with the fact that Intellij products are closed source and can't simply be forked by someone who requires additional capabilities

https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community is Apache 2.0

Only some of the language plugins are proprietary.

[jeroenhd]

> Most just offer inline completions and a chat sidebar

As someone who doesn't use AI all that much: what else does an IDE need besides an inline prompt and a ChatGPT window to the side? I've played around with the continue.dev plugin and I can't think of anything else I'd want out of AI assistants with the quality they're at at the moment.

> GitHub Copilot for Intellij is a shell of itself

That's on Github, to be honest. And to be expected. It doesn't make much sense for Microsoft to fund a plugin for a competitor's IDE when they already have their own IDEs to sell.

> Intellij products are closed source

They follow the same protocol Microsoft uses: the core is open, but some language plugin features are proprietary. For Microsoft, the proprietary part is just the C# debugger at this point, whereas IntellJ has a whole bunch of paid-for plugins that are closed-source. Still, you can fork the community edition of IntelliJ should you wish.