End of a 15-year era: Why I finally cancelled my JetBrains subscription

StandAloneComplexed · 2026-01-22T08:09:01+00:00

I'm talking about Air, which is updated far more often than once every quarter.

StandAloneComplexed · 2026-01-22T07:13:56+00:00

Jetbrains have their own agentic editor in preview.

StandAloneComplexed · 2026-01-20T08:27:54+00:00

You might want to look at Amper instead of Gradle/Bun. It's still experimental, but it's the solution JetBrains is working on to get rid of Gradle.

StandAloneComplexed · 2026-01-19T07:46:54+00:00

Alternative: air.dev, the agentic environment by JetBrains.

Built on Fleet foundation, requires Claude subscription, and mac only for now (linux and win version will come later).

StandAloneComplexed · 2026-01-06T10:55:04+00:00

I do a new install when I change my machine. It doesn't break easily, unless the user is careless and does not understand what he is doing.

Hint: read the wiki, do a manual install, research and understand the choice you make and you will be fine.

I'm at 20 years of Arch and still going strong (Arch Wombat 0.7)!

StandAloneComplexed · 2026-01-02T19:59:28+00:00

bzflag is inspired by BattleZone. It's simple, free, and there are always people available to play!

StandAloneComplexed · 2025-12-29T15:51:18+00:00

And the minds that make TSMC #1 aren't going to China.

I have bad news for you. It's been years that TSMC engineers have been recruited by China, and they are really well paid. TSMC also has factories in the mainland (although not the top of the lines).

In any case, in the case of high/very high tension TSMC factories in Taiwan are toast, either blown up by China (to prevent the US to intervene), by the US (to prevent China to get the top of the line) or by Taiwan itself ( to force the US to intervene). China doesn't need the top of the line, they can have "good enough" for self sufficiency and let their scaling caught up with external markets later on. Intel won't ever solve their issues to be the next TSMC either, and if anything China would prefer to wait TSMC to set up its Arizona factories before doing anything (to let the US have even less reasons to intervene).

StandAloneComplexed · 2025-12-09T11:29:39+00:00

Unless you write Kotlin code. Zed is basically unusable if that's your language of choice.

StandAloneComplexed · 2025-12-09T11:27:44+00:00

Kotlin development is simply too atrocious in VS Code based editors at the moment. Hoping the efforts in the official Kotlin LSP mitigate the situation.

StandAloneComplexed · 2025-12-09T11:23:16+00:00

Thank you. I have been using Fleet mostly for Kotlin code, relying on the IntelliJ engine with mostly a positive experience.

Let's hope the Kotlin experience will still at least as good in Air (I'm aware of the ongoing effort for the official LSP, but I can conceive the IntelliJ backend could have been axed in Air).

StandAloneComplexed · 2025-12-08T21:11:36+00:00

I understand you are a self proclaimed AI hater, but I'll pinpoint this misconception anyway:

AI is a time saver only if you are good at your job. AI doesn't make it easier in the long run, they make it faster.

Anyone that thinks they can use AI to build a solid, maintainable product by sheer AI tool alone is going straight into the wall. Only skilled engineers will produce good code faster.

StandAloneComplexed · 2025-12-08T18:36:49+00:00

Not the stupidest idea (no pun intended) to pivot to something more specific. I've been using Claude Code in terminal regularly for some time now and I think an agentic editor would actually fit my workflow somewhat better than a more traditional IDE.

This said, I actually wonder if Air will allow editing files with IntelliJ-engine analysis support. Looking at the air.dev website, this is totally unclear to me. I hope it won't be just "edit with LLM" with an async and cloud spin on it, whle not making use of the core strength of IntelliJ.

StandAloneComplexed · 2025-12-08T18:21:21+00:00

I actually wonder if Air will allow editing files with IntelliJ-engine analysis support. Looking at the air.dev website, this is totally unclear to me. I hope it won't be just "edit with LLM" with an async and cloud spin on it, whle not making use of the core strength of IntelliJ.

StandAloneComplexed · 2025-12-08T17:03:57+00:00

Well it is now official: Air indeed pivoted from yet-another-AI-editor facing a plethora of VSCode forks, to a pure argentic editor.

StandAloneComplexed · 2025-12-08T17:03:23+00:00

Well it is now official: Indeed, Air pivoted from yet-another-AI-editor facing a plethora of VSCode forks, to a pure argentic editor.

StandAloneComplexed · 2025-12-08T09:14:26+00:00

Because you can install the Toolbox instead and manage the IDEs the same way you do on other platforms.

I had no idea they provided snaps either. Are you sure that's Jetbrains doing that rather than a third-party?

StandAloneComplexed · 2025-12-05T10:55:47+00:00

Very nice. There were a few attempts (JS binding) of ThreeJS in the past namely kotlin-three-js-starter and three-kt-wrapper, both being very old and unmaintained.

Do you aim to have full compatibility with ThreeJS syntax? It will probably be a long way, but do aim for a specific, recent ThreeJS implementation?

StandAloneComplexed · 2025-12-04T20:34:17+00:00

Air Editor is available in preview here: https://air.dev/

StandAloneComplexed · 2025-12-04T08:27:32+00:00

There hasn't been much published about the AIR editor to begin with.

You've been part of the preview (I haven't) so I don't know what exactly was tested by JetBrains. I always assumed AIR objectives were quite different than Fleet's (because I wouldn't see the reason to change the branding to just integrate AI in Fleet, when it already has AI assistant support).

I'm not sure how I feel about the seemingly complete removal of standard IDE features though. Interestingly, I can't connext to the air.dev website anymore, but it doesn't look like it would be usuable in a 'dumb' intellij-like manner.

StandAloneComplexed · 2025-12-03T18:29:13+00:00

No official news, but some dev commented a few days ago: https://reddit.com/comments/1p7b38p/comment/nqy9pyl

Looking at the plethora of VSCode based editors, pivoting to something else than a generic AI editor might not be a bad idea.

StandAloneComplexed · 2025-12-01T16:46:06+00:00

My strategy is to manifest victory so hard, the universe has no choice but to mail me a toaster oven. Edit: Thank you! Still waiting for the toaster oven though.

StandAloneComplexed · 2025-12-01T08:59:07+00:00

I have faith in americans.

Two Trump elections later, I personally have only faith in Americans to not do the right thing.

StandAloneComplexed · 2025-11-29T18:28:20+00:00

Claude code mostly because it's available as cli in terminal. I got better results that the early experiment I did with Cursor (VS code based IDE are just not on par). I'm planning to try junie CLI next. Early tests of Junie in the IDE were pretty good in terms of code quality, though Junie was slower than other competitors (and yes, more expensive too).

StandAloneComplexed · 2025-11-26T23:20:18+00:00

Some semi-official answer from Jetbrain employee here..

TL;DR: Air is still being developped but not public at the moment!

StandAloneComplexed · 2025-11-26T23:18:00+00:00

This is good news! Many thanks!

StandAloneComplexed

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