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Not to rain on their parade, but I do find it at least a little bit funny that Kotlin Multiplatform is JetBrains's prerogative and the app is Mac only, lol...
The litmus test for the utility of this kind of thing is does JetBrains prefer to use Air to develop Air--i.e., is it self-hosting?
Can't wait for this AI shit to be over so they can get back to their bread & butter...great dev tools.
> their bread & butter...great dev tools.

A cursor style "tab" model, but trained on jetbrains IDEs with full access to their internals, refactoring tools and so on would be interesting to see.

Umm, it ain't ever gonna be over, it is a new era.

We need to adapt to new ways of thinking and ways of working with new tooling. It is a learning curve of sorts. What we want is to solve problems, the new tooling enables us to solve problems better by letting us free up our thinking by reducing blockers and toil tasks, giving us more time to think about higher level problems.

Umm, it ain't ever gonna be over, it is a new era.

We need to adapt to new ways of thinking and ways of working with new tooling. It is a learning curve of sorts. What we want is to solve problems, the new tooling enables us to solve problems better by letting us free up our thinking by reducing blockers and toil tasks, giving us more time to think about higher level problems.

I remember this same sentiment towards AI when I was growing up, but towards cell phones...

> Can't wait for this <new technology> shit to be over

Said the assembly senior specialist when first confronted with this newfangled fortran compiler shit.

Finally a step in the right direction. This brings the best of two worlds: the lightweightness of Fleet and agents battle-tested with Junie/IntelliJ.

Congrats to the team. Can’t wait to try it.

I'd like others' input on this: increasingly, I see Cursor, Jetbrains, etc. moving towards a model of having you manage many agents working on different tasks simultaneously. But in real, production codebases, I've found that even a single agent is faster at generating code than I am at evaluating its fitness and providing design guidance. Adding more agents working on different things would not speed anything up. But perhaps I am just much slower or a poorer multi-tasker than most. Do others find these features more useful?
Ooof I forgot to cancel my jetbrains all products license when I switched to vs code. I better go do that now before it renews. Not because of AI but it also doesn’t help
Not to be overly negative but I’m kinda disappointed with this and I have been a JetBrains shill for many years.

I already use this workflow myself, just multiple terminals with Claude on different directories. There’s like 100 of these “Claude with worktrees in parallel” UIs now, would have expected some of the common jetbrains value adds like some deep debugger integration or some fancy test runner view etc. The only one I see called out is Local History and I don’t see any fancy diff or find in files deep integration to diff or search between the agent work trees and I don’t see the jetbrains commit, shelf, etc. git integration that we like.

I do like the cursor-like highlight and add to context thing and the kanban board sort of view of the agent statuses, but this is nothing new. I would have expected at the least that jetbrains would provide some fancier UI that lets you select which directories or scopes should be auto approved for edit or other fancy fine grained auto-approve permissions for the agent.

In summary it looks like just another parallel Claude UI rather than a Jetbrains take on it. It also seems like it’s a separate IDE rather than built on the IntelliJ platform so they probably won’t turn it into a plugin in the future either.

I really like this initiative, I think the biggest value here isn't the multiple sessions or worktrees, but an interoperable protocol between these coding agents through a new UX. A sort of parent process orchestrator of the many agents is something I want, is there other tools that do that today? e.g. run Claude, Codex, Gemini, all together and sharing data with one another?
I've just spent the day reading and reviewing the absolute slop that comes out of these things :'(
I've been drifting from jetbrains to zed lately, but this is making it difficult. I can probably do something similar in zed, but I don't know how.
So do we actually get to edit any of the AI code additions or changes or is this just "PR merge hell mode" in Project Manager Simulator? Yes, I could flip over to my editor, but that kind of misses the whole point of the 'I' in "IDE".

I'm team JetBrains4Life when it comes to IDEs, but their AI offerings have been a pretty mixed bag of mixed messages. And this one requires a separate subscription at that when I'm already paying for their own AI product.

Seems like the best competitor to Conductor at the moment. They did a great job.
JetBrains should stop building stupid AI shit and fix their IDEs. 2025 versions are bordering on unusable.