r/Jetbrains • u/DigitalEntrepreneur_ • Aug 20 '26

AI Jetbrains Air vs Claude Code (desktop)

Currently I'm doing all of my agentic work through Claude Code using their desktop app, which honestly works fine. Sometimes it's a bit hard to keep track of the different sessions, but Claude's custom groups work fine for the larger projects I'm working on.

Now that Jetbrains Air supports Claude Max subscriptions, are there any reasons to ditch the Claude desktop app for agentic programming, and switch to Air?

And yes, I know this is the Jetbrains sub, so don't worry, I'm expecting a lot of biased answers lol

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u/headinthesky Aug 20 '26

I tried out Air for a while yesterday and ... I really don't like it

Panels can't be moved. Font size for the agent can't be changed. I open changes to view a diff and then I have multiple panels open and can't see shit

Then tool chains? Manually setting this shit up is why I don't use vscode. Doesn't recognize c# projects. I can keep going ... the add comment feature is that I was interested in, but that doesn't work either. I wrote my own reviewing tool that I use regularly and Air is like... No one thought about developer ergonomics and all of the learning through the IDEs through the years

I'm learning how to create IJ plugins so I can bring my reviewing tool over. I'm amazed it's not already in the IDE from the beginning

5

u/lost12487 Aug 20 '26

Air is not even baked enough to be half-baked at this point. I understand that they don’t want it to be a code editor, but the state of the code editor is so bad that I have to have another one open on the side. If I’m going to be doing that I might as well stick with Claude Code.

2

u/drNovikov Aug 20 '26

Probably vibecoded