“One of the most significant steps in our 26-year history”: JetBrains goes big on agentic development — and bets the IDE still matters
The New Stack Paul Sawers
JetBrains bundled its AI agent tools into one platform called Air. It’s betting developers still need the IDE to review and steer all that machine-written code.
Based on reporting by The New Stack, Paul Sawers — read the original for the full story.
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JetBrains is trying to answer a simple problem that keeps getting harder: if more coding work starts in agents, what is left for the IDE? The company has spent 26 years building tools like IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm and WebStorm, and now it is arguing that the editor still sits at the center of professional development — not because agents won’t wander off, but because humans still have to check their work.
On Tuesday, CEO Kirill Skrygan introduced JetBrains Air on LinkedIn as an “open system of products for agentic software development,” meant to work inside and outside JetBrains IDEs. That umbrella now covers several efforts JetBrains has been rolling out in pieces: the Air desktop app, Junie CLI, JetBrains Central, and AI for Teams and Organizations. Each one handled a different layer, from individual coding to company-wide governance. Air ties them together.
The Air desktop app first showed up in public preview in March as a standalone agentic development environment on macOS. It let developers run Claude Agent, Codex, Gemini CLI and JetBrains’ own Junie side by side. Junie also escaped the IDE through Junie CLI, so it could run in terminals, CI/CD systems and other editors. Then came JetBrains Central, which focused on organizational controls. In July, AI for Teams and Organizations added shared context, cloud agents, automations and cost controls.
Now JetBrains is giving that stack a clearer shape. Air in JetBrains IDEs is for directing agents and checking their work. Air Teams handles collaboration between developers and autonomous agents in shared cloud environments. Air Governance, the new name for JetBrains Central, covers policy, auditing, spending limits and which models or agents people can use.
JetBrains is also keeping the standalone Air app alive on macOS, Windows and Linux, with a browser version for organizations. And it plans to bring Air to mobile, so developers can monitor and continue agent work away from their desks. The company has already been testing an Air Alpha plugin in IntelliJ-based IDEs since at least early August, with an update earlier this month adding more controls for watching and steering agent sessions. JetBrains says it will keep shipping rough edges, weekly updates and all. The bigger message is less messy: the IDE is not being retired. It is being promoted to traffic controller.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
JetBrains is reading the moment better than the companies pretending the editor is dead. Agents can draft code all day, but somebody still has to own the mess, and the IDE is where that accountability lives. The funny part is that the more AI spreads, the more valuable a serious review surface becomes.
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