JetBrains IDEs are highly extensible, and they have support for AI completions. Nevertheless, I think that the assistance and navigation features in IDEs are much more useful than auto-generating half-broken code.

I've spent a few weeks trying the built-in AI in IntelliJ, and the Copilot plugin as well.

I have to say that even though sometimes both AIs offer amazing suggestions, it's really distracting to me to have constant multi-line completions being suggested non-stop! And sometimes it's a suggestion that would probably make sense in a widely different context, but you can see how the AI would believe it was appropriate for you anyway and you start wondering about nonsense. I had to disable that.

The line-completion that IntelliJ has by default now was quite a bit better IMO. It really helped and was not so distracting.

Anyway, I can't tell which AI was best, they both seemed similar in capabilities. The JB AI is a bit more well integrated, obviously, so it's a bit easier for me to accept completions for example (with Copilot, sometimes it competes with the normal IDE completions and I can't easily pick one). Anyone has an opinion on that?

> The line-completion that IntelliJ has by default now was quite a bit better IMO. It really helped and was not so distracting.

I very much agree. The line-completion is a very well done AI integration.

I think there's a lot of potential to integrate AI into IDEs, but it will likely be less of a low-hanging fruit in comparison with simple code completion.

Ah, I see. It sounds like you haven't tried something like Cursor, on tasks/languages that it performs well on. It'll be interesting for you when you discover what it's like. You don't accept large quantities of implementation ab initio; but they're very good nowadays at modifying and extending with non-broken code.

Right now, I’d say the “AI IDEs” like Cursor or Zed are ready to replace less Java-centric environments. I’d put VSCode in this “not really Java centric” bucket. I see VSCode as a “fancy text editor” for Java, i.e., better than an editor like Neovim, but, not by much. So, an AI IDE is more likely going to gain traction on people who have been using VSCode or Neovim than anyone using Eclipse or IntelliJ.

Recently, my company has tried to introduce a “cloud IDE” (the development environment runs in the cloud somewhere). Initially, it only supported VSCode. The only engineers that bothered using it were junior; once people had about 5+ years of experience, they just found it tedious. Once the company included IntelliJ for that cloud IDE, usage spiked massively. (To the point they are restricting usage due to cost.)

These “classic Java IDEs” just launch with features useful for understanding large systems, like, fast navigation and debugging capabilities. Things like “where is method used” or “what implements this interface method” is fast and accurate - i.e., not based on text search. Or the interactive debugger that lets you inspect stream state, track objects, etc.

JetBrains probably won’t be focusing on using AI simply for writing code, but for enhancing all of these other capabilities. This is where I’m not sold on Cursor or Zed replacing these truly language-specific IDEs… yet.

These new upstarts need to improve the ability to navigate and understand. Right now, they only seem to focus on writing, which I don’t think is what’s going to gain traction. I also don’t see any of them doing much other than just fancy autocomplete, which can be awful on a large legacy codebase. So… we’ll see.

This could be generational, I’ve definitely seen poorer DevEx win simply because they gained the attention of younger engineers and lasted long enough.

I mean, yeah if you are using Kotlin you are almost inherently locked in to IntelliJ... by design. But for java proper, it's far from the only viable IDE.

> Surely the solution isn't to assume that JetBrains will do enough innovation in AI IDE features in the next year or two to prevent is wanting to try out all the other AI IDE innovation?

They kind of have been doing just that, their jetbrains AI assistant has an integration comparable to cursor's, just the model itself isn't as good which is a shame