I think so. From my experience Claude/codex tooling really excels at vibe coding the whole thing. You give it a folder and just say: now make it do this. And you don’t really care for the code.
Junie tooling excels when you are more involved. Like, look in these two files, add this specific functionality, in this specific way. Junie is usually a lot faster and to the point. Very simple tooling , it just works for this workflow. But it breaks for the “code the whole thing for me” workflow.
It surprises me how JetBrains managed to lose such a great market opportunity.
I don't think they ever going to be able to re-claim large chunk of developers who are now fine with thin VSCode-like + Terminal for non-JVM languages.
Perfect example of how large corp with research capacity failed to navigate their product changes.
My most enjoyable and productive experiences with AI so far have looked more like pair-programming than agent-based vibe coding. That is to say, I care about the details, and I want to read, understand, edit, and curate the codebase. I find that if I'm not limiting AI to relatively small enhancements per request-review cycle (100 or so LOC), then when things inevitably go off the rails, I'm in a deep hole that takes a long time to climb out of.
I haven't tried out Junie yet, but the concept seems pretty compelling to me. I want a good IDE for the language I'm using, and I'd like an AI that's well integrated and trained on delegating to it for algorithmic/deterministic transforms (e.g. IDE-driven refactorings).
Junie tooling excels when you are more involved. Like, look in these two files, add this specific functionality, in this specific way. Junie is usually a lot faster and to the point. Very simple tooling , it just works for this workflow. But it breaks for the “code the whole thing for me” workflow.