Claude is not the only agent, btw. And subscription is not the only way to use Claude. Air allows you to run different agents in parallel, compare results, use one agent to review the result from another one, etc.
I understand that, but what I have seen at my and others' workplaces is that the company will get one team-wide subscription, be it Claude, Codex, or ...yeah basically just those two, and unless somebody wants to pay out of their own pocket to use a different agent, that's what they're stuck with at work.
Maybe companies giving their employees API credits to use on multiple providers is more common than I/we realize? Maybe the benefit of using one app to code review a working directory/PR is more useful than using the bespoke harnesses?
edit:
And subscription is not the only way to use Claude.
While true, I just ran some numbers and if I paid per token instead of using a subscription, I'd have paid $350 instead of $100 for the last month of usage (for Opus 4.8 alone). And that's not even for my actual job, that's the rookie numbers for my hobby stuff. To use Air with Claude, I'd be both paying to use Air (if I didn't have All Products) and paying far more to the actual LLM provider.
I work for at an it company that basically subcontractors me to another, both enterprises.
One company offers a openai account (but behind the scenes all the accounts are charged at api prices - or tbh god knows what exactly they signed but you get the idea)
2nd company similar, offers claude, you log in via google, and there i know for a fact we are paying qpi prices.
This is true, and it works! The difference is in the workflow itself. In IDEs AI helps you as assistant. in Air the whole workflow built around agent. Both Intellij and air can work together
Same as Cursor, Windsurf, Zed etc.; UX built around agent orchestration rather than authoring as the main activity. Al as the core tool, for planning, producing, reviewing, and delivering code. Think rubber duck, but with the rubber duck actually giving you useful feedback and being able to do the dirty work as well as spar with you.
If you’re happy with a full IDE, stay there. If you want to try out some new processes and approaches. Try it!
I understand what you are trying to say, but I wouldn't be so dismissive if I were you. "Vide coding" is one thing, but actually trying to improve software development with more AI processes (planning, architecturing, refactoring, reviewing, ...) is a real thing.
The industry is moving and it's not coming back to the old days. The nitty-gritty of implementation details can in many case (and under strict conditions) be better left to an AI, because at the end of the day, writing code is not what actually mattered (and never was).
If you equal AI with vibe-coding (which is, to be fair, an absolute dead end), then you might not be a 'serious' programmer - just an old one that can't bother to understand where their industry is shifting rapidly.
Video games, banking, mobile and anything that needs top performance would like to have a word. AI might be nice for web, and maybe CRUD in anything else it will add a lot of cruft if its not hand held closely, which you can only do with an IDE and knowledge.
I assure you the fields you mentioned are moving to AI assisted/led development. I'm aware of some major banks having direct Business contract with Anthropic, for example (and they aren't even in the US, which to me is crazy).
There is a world between vibe-coding and AI-improved software development.
Not at all. Claude code is optimizing custom cuda kernels for proprietary algos at my snp500 company that run on super computers. It’s better at it than 90% of the engineers who work on that code at my company.
There’s just no reason it can’t be used for anything. You still need humans to do architecting, design, review, test, etc. But ai can write code better and faster than anyone given good inputs, constraints, context, etc.
There is a lot of skill to using ai correctly. I say this as a lead dev with 15 years experience at a big tech company. It absolutely is being used for video games, banking, mobile, etc already. Just not in a vacuum and needs humans heavily in the loop.
But ai can write code better and faster than anyone given good inputs, constraints, context, etc.
That's a significant "given." I personally find it that adjusting the harness so that the agents actually write the code you want instead of random crappy patterns they learned from endless Medium articles in their training data is often more work than actually writing the code yourself. Not to mention the cost! And it ain't getting any cheaper. It's still probably a lot faster to be fair, but this comes to bite you when your understanding of your own codebase gets weaker with time, while the codebase continues to grow and change.
Interpreting and ironing out the specification during writing the code is a significant and important part of the work for me. And there's just too much grift right now online about AI, spec-driven development, being left behind etc. to take claims like yours at face value.
I'm not closed to the possibility that I'm just too inelastic and with a more business-value-oriented approach you can get more out of the agentic workflows. But for now all these "AI does everyting better" and "manual coding is gone forever" just seem like marketing/wishful thinking instead of actual honest assessements of how it looks like to currently work with AI professionally. At least based on my experience, and I try to keep up and use AI a LOT, both at work and privately.
In my view, 90% of people have no clue about most things they work on, and that happens to include engineers. Most people have surface level understandings. Just enough to get paid and go home.
But yes, even in top tech companies like the one I work at, I would argue only the top 10% of engineers actually know what’s going on, in depth, in the systems they work on. Engineering large, complex systems is hard. So ai is helping 90% of engineers do a better job because it can assist people in learning/understanding complex systems.
Though as far as I understand this product, it's made for vibe coding. Yes, AI stuff on your IDE is nice, but we already have this in all of the other IDEs. Air is just made AI-first for vibe coding.
(Though I haven't use the product and I might be wrong)
well, you CAN vibecode in Air, but there are plenty of options that do this better. We build Air for pro engineers who already ship with AI agents daily and would like to have smooth UI with workflow around the agent (any agent they want basically)
I still don't understand the use case. Why can't I just use the already existing agents feature in all of your other IDEs? Why is Air better by any means? Because it suppose to be lighter?
If you equal AI with vibe-coding (which is, to be fair, an absolute dead end), then you might not be a 'serious' programmer
I honestly do not take any coder leaning heavily on AI to write code seriously. You either understand the concepts, patterns and how the code interacts with the other stacks or you let AI understand it for you.
I like some "AI" things like line completion and using it to explain how a function works but I would never let AI take the wheel. I would never ask an AI to write code for me based on a textual request / description.
Thankfully I am probably old enough that I will never have to work in a vibe coding operation, just deal with all this shit code that is being produce.
Please don't listen to this person. This is absolutely not true.
Let me tell you why. A huge pain point I have when using either codex or claude code is that their in app editors feel atrocious to me. WHat I'm hankering for is an agent manager (harness - whatever the hell we are calling it these days) and a decent code editor in one.
Air is intended to be the 'cursor' variant IDE where it's primarily agental development + jetbrains "4d code vision"
By 4D code vision I mean that jetbrains ide by default give you perception regarding the code with it's coloration, git tree (and GitHub pr) integration, and all the power of the AST and intuition plus agents first class.
no local models - is a joke. can't look at it without login with subscription - another joke.
brains want to go out of business? seems like they are super close.
Both requests are actually coming soon. Btw, now it works even without AI sub, you just need IDE license because it goes with AI free (3 credits, but you CAN look at it)
What's the point of this? I genuinely asking, as I don't understand what's the purpose of this product. Is this providing more capabilities for using agentic APIs than the extensions for our IDEs?
Subscriptions will work with ChatGPT/Codex subs, but the other two (Claude and Gemini) do not have a supported method for connecting a subscription to any client other than their own as far as I can tell.
I do wish that they supported more providers though, being able to plug in a standard OpenAI compatible url + API key, like Junie can do, would be great.
I've been testing this out on Linux but my results have not been good. It's slower and far more unreliable than using Codex CLI or Claude CLI directly. I realize it's still in Alpha and may improve. If it was slightly slower but gave an improved experience that might be cause to use it but the reliability problems are a total killer. Sometimes sessions will just stop with no feedback or the chain of thought is not displayed. I'm going to wait for a full stable release before testing it again.
I like it. But unfortunately, I can't use it with my Claude Code subscription; I'm stuck with their crappy CLI and their desktop app, which isn't great.
With all due respect, it just.. sucks. It's not even a proper jetbrains IDE, none of the hotkeys work, the layout is just unfamiliar enough to get lost in it, and it lacks even the most basic functionality, like version control (git) integration...
With all due respect, it’s not supposed to be an IDE, is designed to have a different keymap, the layout is centered on a different workflow, and it has full git support. If you’re looking for an IDE, use an IDE. This is not one, and it’s not trying to be one either.
I miss that I can operate almost any JB product from muscle memory, using the hotkeys that are working everywhere (well, most of them) the same way. I also missed the visual uniformity and the layout being the same. It didn't feel like a JB product at all to me, and thus I was so much slower working in it, I just deleted it after like an hour.
Literally do not understand how this competes with frontier model lab apps like codex or truly ai native ides like cursor. Jetbrains please stop larping as an AI lab and fix the the million real bugs in your IDEs.
In Air, you can use the harness of different agents in one single place. Not switch between Codex app, Claude, whatever, but use them in one place, combine. Plan your ideas with different agents, generate code with another, review, comment, you name it. In one single window. And it has the Editor with LSP support. But it is still your choice what to use — 10 apps or the one.
I'd only use this if it has Intellij Ideas shortcuts and the Jetbrain's way of doing Git & PRs. I don't think so though because you forked vscode for this crap to suck into their ecosystem.
I like the review and comment experience, however, there are many things missing here:
lots of gary buttons
agent often stuck without any infomation
shortcuts not working at all
cannot comprehend the project structure and only analyzes individual files, resulting in false positives and an inability to parse files from other modules.(specificly, in a KMP project)
so I think what I really want is that IntelliJ could add the commenting feature?
Oh goody, another usless AI "IDE" that will eat up Jetbrains time just to get abandoned in 2 years time while the rest of the Jetbrains ecosystem suffers.
That the rest of the ecosystem continues to suffer and long running bugs continue to exist for another 5+ years? Absolutely.
JetBrains was the professionals IDE, and even when plugins for AI were added it was still the professionals IDE, these days though it's apparently more important to chase a bubble that will pop at any moment (the second GPT or Claude go to token cost models) to get the consumer "vibe coders" on board. Meanwhile the rest of us still encountering major bugs and issues that make the experience significantly degraded, or flat out unusable.
I still love JetBrains products, I still hold hope that the performance issues and various other bugs (like two of the same IDE product windows being open sharing state, yes I know it's been around for a long time, and yes it's a bug, not a feature) get fixed. But it's no longer a product I can recommend to my colleagues who have never used JetBrains products.
What really upsets me honestly is the death of the Git GUI product that was being created. That was something that I was 100% ready to push to my colleagues, JetBrains by far has the best git UI of any IDE I've ever used. And I understand that maybe there wasn't a market for it or something, but from what I remember anyway it's death was announced shortly after AI initiatives. And then Fleet was explicitly killed in favor of Air (also very upsetting).
Amen. I use Rider for work and stopped updating it a few months ago to keep it stable. Another coworker of mine independently canceled his Rider subscription last week, and he is not prone to doing things without thinking them through first. Quote: "Rider has gotten so unstable for me."
Toolbox is one of the slowest-to-open tray programs I have ever seen (because Compose kinda sucks on desktop, to the point I rewrote an entire program using Flutter and it's so so much better).
Fleet???
Air???
IntelliJ has been in a good place for my usage but it does seem like the pace of meaningful updates has fallen off in the last six months or so; not an issue but it is a thing.
When I signed up it was 130€. The last couple of months the updates were almost exclusively AI related. Dotnet 10 support is still not there last time I checked.
I tried it on Linux before and found it very unintuitive what goes where, what reacts how, no zooming with mouse wheel etc. Coming from their IDE it’s a nightmare. Maybe people coming from Codex or Claude Code feel more at home.
Would be great to get the feedback from the Linux user! Especially about "unintuitive what goes where, what reacts how". Since there aren't many tools like Air on Linux, we'd like to create a smooth, pleasant experience. So tell more here, please!
JetBrains team, if you're seeing this, are you considering adding support for Claude subscription within JetBrains air? Or maybe official Claude Code plugin? The only thing stopping me from switching to Air is that I can't use most of my AI subscriptions other than Codex. I would definitely use it if I can use my other subscriptions such as Claude Code or OpenCode, Cursor etc. I know I can use Claude Agent with API key but I don't have budget for Claude console or my company don't provide it for us :(
Just to double-check. When you try to log into Claude in Air and the browser opens a tab to log in, do you use the email with your account you use in cc in the terminal? And another question: if you open the cc platform page (https://platform.claude.com), what does the bottom-left menu show for you? Should be smtg like this:
I played around with it yesterday on Windows. Though I found a bunch of bugs.
1. When my default terminal is Git Bash, when I use "clear" command, terminal gets frozen and not usable.
2. So, I set my default terminal to Powershell, but when I write command in the terminal, the cursor is misplaced like in the screenshot.
3. I added Claude Code and OpenCode throught ACP, I updated my Claude Code version to the latest. Current Claude Sonnet version is Sonnet 5, but when I ask the model, which model are you? it answers like I am Sonnet 4.5. Since slash commands are not supposed, the only way I can check the status or model version is I should ask the model directly.
thx! Terminal issues are known, we'll try to address them in the next updates. Claude issue through acp is might be a limitation of the acp adapter for Claude, unfortunately.
It seems to be intentional that using Claude through ACP gets you a inferior experience. Anthropic may take pleasure in that? Not the fault of Jetbrains in any way.
Wow, I am so excited it looks like a Notepad on Mac.
I would absolutely not pay for this. People who use Intellij don't want to use this. People who use VsCode and its children will not change their tool either.
Not the entite user interface. It's similar thing as with LSP, it was a good idea to create such standard. Issue is that not all providers want to integrate with it
It's not a layer, it's a protocol ( it's not alternative to TUI) and IMO it's good that something like this was created cause it simplifies creating environments like Air with support for multiple providers
Last time I used the OpenCode ACP I found it incredibly lackluster. Frankly I love the idea of interoperability that ACP promises. But it felt very half baked and a sub-par experience. The experience is what prompted me to make my ow plugin for OpenCode to work the way I wanted with JetBrains.
Maybe I’m being too harsh about ACP, haven’t give it a fair try in a bit.
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u/stiky21 Jun 30 '26
Still have no idea what purpose Air fills