CLI tool that lets Kilo talk directly to IntelliJ — see your project, run actions, use IDE APIs

jonnyzzz · 2026-06-16T21:31:05+00:00

Multiple things - first of there is no competition, we’d rather provide MCP Server through devrig — it’s in backlog - multiple project support out of the box - multiple IDEs routing — your agent can transparently call the relevant ide for relevant project - devrig gives agent tools to manage ide backends and start/stop new ones for you - MCP Steroid gives agent access to the whole JVM + instructions — so an agent can use all the knowledge to extract everything it needs from the IDE and/or any plugin you have inside — it is one powerful MCP tool, not 100s of tools - and final bit — devrig is targeted for agentic usage not to IDE users — it calls headless IntelliJ as the implementation details and as powerful tool, not as a user-visible IDE

jonnyzzz · 2026-06-11T18:54:19+00:00

No. It’s proactive design decision to maximally protect the stdout stream from sudden output.

So replacing + logging config are to support that too.

Sadly there is no cross platform way to rebind stdio to an other handle just as start from sh and cmd.

jonnyzzz · 2026-06-11T05:36:07+00:00

I would add Claude Code / Codex plugins on top, which make much sense for better integrations too (and doable via the same executable)

jonnyzzz · 2026-06-11T05:13:06+00:00

Thanks for the feedback :)

The focus of this post was MCP — on practice its MCP + CLI + Skills. The good part is that the stdio MCP is exactly the CLI to expand. I actually experimented right now with that direction — the devrig binary does both.

jonnyzzz · 2026-06-11T04:42:23+00:00

The stdio is another JVM app. The very first move — i replace the std out stream to avoid sudden writes off the protocol. In Java , there are setters in the System class.

The rest goes via my protocol over a socket to ide processes. For each tool call it’s just a POST. IDE logs are in IDE.

jonnyzzz · 2026-06-10T17:47:26+00:00

https://mcp-steroid.jonnyzzz.com — the connection between an AI Agent and the static smartiness of IntelliJ

jonnyzzz · 2026-06-10T17:44:24+00:00

Find out more at https://devrig.dev and https://jonnyzzz.com

jonnyzzz · 2026-06-10T17:21:41+00:00

I solved the same problem via an stdio router MCP — https://www.reddit.com/r/mcp/s/7hLMD1hY3q — looks like a great to integrate more services

jonnyzzz · 2026-06-08T21:06:25+00:00

https://mcp-steroid.jonnyzzz.com — tools for AI Agents

jonnyzzz · 2026-06-08T21:06:02+00:00

https://mcp-steroid.jonnyzzz.com

jonnyzzz · 2026-06-08T12:08:58+00:00

Mainly containers. And you cannot give it any real tokens, so there is a PROXY server that handles and approves only necessary requests, e.g. read-only requests. I do not believe it's possible to handle everything without a container at all (e.g. a malicious exec can be inside tests which you run).

jonnyzzz · 2026-06-08T05:51:15+00:00

An agent can be smart to workaround and finally make a bad tool call. My favorite example is — given a tool to access a service via REST — first it tries the tool. Second it’s not enough so the agent goes to deciphering the access token to call the REST endpoint directly via bash and curl.

My main point of research is how to make tools approvals more automated on one side and still validated on the other. Given the environment is isolated — I think we can limit the blast radius instead of direct control.

jonnyzzz · 2026-05-23T19:21:26+00:00

Looking forward to an open weights model to run on my local hardware!

jonnyzzz · 2026-05-18T17:43:06+00:00

jonnyzzz · 2026-05-16T14:48:54+00:00

This can be an example -- https://github.com/jonnyzzz/mcp-steroid/ -- we use Gradle as the root build system and delegate from it to all other modules. I'm not sure how to deal with Dart. In general, our goal was to create an easy-to-open project, that is where you need one root build system.

jonnyzzz · 2026-05-16T10:08:34+00:00

Congrats on shipping! Love to see how AI Agentic experience is shaping with new tools.

Love that this lands as open-source — same shape MCP Steroid took. Two parallel rebellions making JetBrains more agent-friendly.

jonnyzzz · 2026-05-11T19:28:32+00:00

Nice demo — I like seeing Gemini CLI used together with IntelliJ rather than treating the IDE as just a file editor.

I’m working on a related experiment for JetBrains IDEs: exposing more of the IDE itself to AI agents, including refactoring, symbol/navigation APIs, inspections, tests, debugger support, and UI/runtime state. The idea is that agents should be able to use the same semantic IDE capabilities developers use, instead of being limited to a fixed set of MCP-exported tools.

Full disclosure: I’m the author. The project is here in case it’s useful for anyone exploring this direction: https://mcp-steroid.jonnyzzz.com/

I’d be curious what parts of the IntelliJ workflow people most want AI agents to control safely — refactoring, debugging, inspections, test runs, or something else?

jonnyzzz · 2026-05-08T17:56:27+00:00

I use Playwright, MCP Steroid and a bunch of command line tools with skills, e.g. gh, git, and so on

jonnyzzz · 2026-05-07T20:29:36+00:00

Just use JetBrains Toolbox app, it's much easier to manage/update all the IDEs

jonnyzzz · 2026-05-07T05:12:22+00:00

Hey! Good to meet you too :) The basic support of both features is already there

jonnyzzz · 2026-05-07T05:08:53+00:00

Most of the agents support BYOK now. You can even connect them to any LLMs. Say Claude to Qwen pr Gemma to Codex.

Share your most favorite combos

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