Embedding AI into developer software
OpenAI
JetBrains built an AI coding assistant on OpenAI's API, and it's become their fastest-growing product ever. Proof that even legacy dev-tool makers can win big by bolting on someone else's model instead of building their own.
Based on reporting by OpenAI — read the original for the full story.
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OpenAI just added another logo to its growing wall of enterprise customer stories, and this one lands close to home for anyone who writes code for a living. JetBrains, the Czech company behind IntelliJ, PyCharm and a suite of IDEs that generations of developers have grown up on, built its AI assistant using OpenAI's API. According to OpenAI, the result is the fastest-growing product JetBrains has ever shipped.
That's a notable claim from a 25-year-old company that has launched dozens of tools over the decades. JetBrains didn't try to train its own frontier model from scratch, something plenty of well-funded startups have burned through cash attempting. Instead it plugged into OpenAI's existing infrastructure and pointed it at the very specific, very lucrative problem of helping millions of programmers write, debug and refactor code faster.
The pitch here isn't subtle: this is OpenAI positioning itself as the backend for the software industry's next generation of tools, rather than just a chatbot people visit directly. Every time a company like JetBrains embeds GPT-family models into a product developers already trust and pay for, OpenAI picks up usage and revenue without having to build the product itself. It's the same platform logic Microsoft ran with Windows decades ago, just aimed at API calls instead of operating systems.
For developers, the practical upshot is that AI assistance is quietly becoming table stakes in tooling, not a novelty tacked onto a roadmap slide. JetBrains betting its fastest-ever growth on this integration says something about where demand actually is right now — not in flashy demos, but in autocomplete, code review and debugging built directly into the editor people already open every morning.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the boring-but-correct move: instead of every software company burning money training its own model, JetBrains rented the smartest one available and shipped. I'd rather see ten companies do that well than one company waste eighteen months and a Series B building a mediocre in-house model just to say they own the stack.
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