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I really can't understand why JetBrains hasn't integrated its refactoring tools into the AI system. Really missed the boat on making their platform transformati
by spullara 10mo ago
I really can't understand why JetBrains hasn't integrated its refactoring tools into the AI system. Really missed the boat on making their platform transformational for AI coding. Imagine how much smaller the context would be for a tool that renames a function than editing hundreds of files. This LSP support is a good start but without the mutation functions it is still pretty lackluster. Plus LSPs aren't as good as JetBrains generally.
- parpfish 10mo agoJetbrainz needs to give up on Junie and their in house ai and focus on integrating with the established tools. If they don’t, VS code will consume them.
- octopoc 10mo agoI really enjoy Junie, I find it working better out of the box than Claude code. I do wish they integrated their amazing refactoring tools into it though.
- dvtkrlbs 10mo agoThey already kinda did. They brough ACP support which allows you to somewhat integrate Claude Code, Gemini CLI or OpenCode they also recently brought BYOK support so you can use an existing provider and don't pay extra subscription for it.
- CuriouslyC 10mo agoACP seems super under the radar. It has some support, but it got merged into A2A, which I don't hear anyone talking about, so it seems like it's going to die on the vine.
- dbalatero 10mo agoThis is really too bad, as editors should be able to plug and play with AI tooling in the same way that editors <> LSP can plug and play with language tooling.
- dvtkrlbs 10mo agoI mean I tried Zeds implementation with OpenCode was working fine but yeah the whole standards part is really complicated right now. I can't keep track of it. I hear about A2A but did not know it was merged with ACP.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 10mo agoMy beef with zeds implementation is they haven’t kept it up to date. I really like the ide integration but when you don’t support half the things that make Claude code really nice, like hooks, it kinda defeats the purpose
- cmsparks 10mo ago> It has some support, but it got merged into A2A, which I don't hear anyone talking about, so it seems like it's going to die on the vine. I'm not sure this is true, do you have a source? Maybe conflating this with the recent Agentic AI Foundation & MCP news?
- auscompgeek 10mo agoI think you may be confusing Agent Client Protocol with Agent Communication Protocol.
- ignatovs 10mo agoI think that https://agentclientprotocol.com/ https://agentclientprotocol.com/ was mentioned as ACP
- atombender 10mo agoThey've already done that. After the Junie fiasco, they pivoted to "AI Assistant", where Junie is just another provider alongside Anthropic and OpenAI. In theory, you have Claude Code inside Jetbrains IDEs now. What's incredible is just how bad it works. I nearly always work with projects that mount multiple folders, and the IDE's MCP doesn't support that. So it doesn't understand what folders are open and can't interact with them. Junie the same issue, and the AI Assistant appears to have inherited it. The issue has been open for ages and ignored by Jetbrains. I also tried out their full line completion, and it's incomprehensibly bad, at least for Go, even with "cloud" completion enabled. I'm back to using Augment, which is Claude-based autocompletion.
- mirzap 10mo agoYeah, it's quite odd that they can't get AI tools to work, especially considering so many OSS tools available that work surprisingly well (cline, opencode, etc.).
- atombender 10mo agoHow do these compare? I'm very familiar with Augment and particularly enjoy its fast completions. I mostly don't use its agent, but rather Claude Code in the terminal, because the agent seems superior. But Augment is not the most stable. I've had lots of serious problems with it. The newest problem that's pushing me over the edge is that it's recently have been causing the IDE to shoot up to use all cores (it's rare to see an app use 1,000% CPU in the macOS Activity Monitor, but it did it!) when it needs to recompute indexes, which is the only thing that has ever made my M2 Mac run its fan. It's not very reliable generally (e.g. autocompletions don't always appear), so I'd be interested in trying alternatives.
- bikelang 10mo agoIs there something with the Claude code plugin for JB IDEs you don’t like? Is there something the VSCode Claude Code plugin does better?
- wiseowise 10mo agoI can’t speak for Claude, but Gemini is laughably bad. Like, does someone who develop this shit ever tried to use it? Is it all crab hands that only use mouse? It’s a single line change to switch focus to THE ONLY INPUT on a tool window, but no, you have to use a shortcut to switch to Gemini window and then MOVE YOUR MOUSE across the screen to select input or press tab like 5 times. Embarrassment. VSCode? Select AI view via shortcut or CMD + P and you’re done. That’s how you do it.
- cedws 10mo agoIf not VSCode then Zed. It feels like Zed is what they wanted Fleet to be.
- anthonypasq 10mo agothere is a jetbrains MCP server that gives Claude Code access to this sort of thing, but I think its still fairly jank and bloats context.
- shermantanktop 10mo agoI never got it to work, but in the process of trying it became obvious that it’s an under-resourced feature.
- dionian 10mo agoit would hang for me half the time , the last time i tried it (3-4months ago?). when it worked, it seemed really good. but it hung often. time to try again
- derfurth 10mo agoI had issues in the beginning, now it works fine, Claude is using it all the time to find things in my codebase.
- vb-8448 10mo agoI think they are completely screwing up the AI integration. After years of JetBrains PyCharm pro I'm seriously considering switch to cursor. Before supermaven being acquired, pycharm+supermaven was feeling like having superpowers ... i really wish they will manage to somehow catch up, otherwise the path is written: crisis, being acquired by some big corp, enshitification.
- spullara 10mo agoaugmentcode has a great plugin for pycharm (and all jetbrains products) if you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
- vb-8448 10mo agoActually currently I'm using augment, it's good, but still subpar when compared to old supervmaven or cursor. One thing that I'm really missing is the automatic cursor move.
- spullara 10mo agoInteresting, I have completely stopped using the editor at this point and do everything through the agent except reading diffs.
- vb-8448 10mo agoI have running subscriptions with both claude and codex. They are good but, at least for me, don't fully replace the coding part. Plus I tend to lose focus because of basically random response time.
- cyberax 10mo agoJetBrains has AI support. It's a bit janky right now, but it is definitely getting better. They have an MCP server, but it doesn't provide easy access to their code metadata model. Things like "jump to definition" are not yet available. This is really annoying, they just need to add a bit more polish and features, and they'll have a perfect counter to Cursor.
- dist-epoch 10mo agoPeople keep saying how amazing IntelliJ is at refactoring, but then you realize the talk about "rename thing" and "extract function". This is 5% of what refactoring is, the rest is big scale re-architecting code where these tools are useless. The agents can do this big scale architecturing if you describe exactly what you want. IntelliJ has no moat here, because they can do well 5% of what refactoring is.
- spullara 10mo agoI think that the commonly used refactoring functions would make a big difference and right now most IDEs are pretty bad at them (especially across all the languages jetbrains supports): - rename variable/function - extract variable/function - find duplicate code - add/remove/extract function parameter - inline a function - moving code between classes - auto imports Others are used more rarely and can probably be left out but I do think it would save a lot of tokens, errors and time.
- marwamc 10mo agoAgentic refactoring was such a chore I ended up building this for my refactoring workflows. https://gitlab.com/rhobimd-oss/shebe/-/blob/main/docs/guides/mcp-tools-reference.md?ref_type=heads#11-tool-find_references https://gitlab.com/rhobimd-oss/shebe/-/blob/main/docs/guides... https://gitlab.com/rhobimd-oss/shebe/-/tree/main?ref_type=heads#why-shebe https://gitlab.com/rhobimd-oss/shebe/-/tree/main?ref_type=he... Then in skills or CLAUDE.md I instruct claude to use this mcp tool to enumerate all files need changing/updating.
- Andrew2137 10mo agoIs it possible to still somehow download fleet,does anyone have idk an exe or something or know a website where It is still possible?
- Tarean 10mo agoIntellij also has structural search and replace, where you can do full subgraph isomorphism search in the code and with patterns like $x$.foo($args$) Where you add filters like x's type is a subclass of some class, and args stands for 0-n arguments. You can also access the full intellij API via groovy scripts in the filters or when computing replacement variables, if you really want. Though most of the time built in refactors like 'extract to _' or 'move to' or 'inline' or 'change type signature' or 'find duplicates' are enough.
- ch2026 10mo agoThey wanted to, but they’re still waiting for the IDE itself to simply load.
- clintonb 10mo agoYou joke and folks downvote, but this is my biggest issue with WebStorm. I'm seriously considering switching for the first time in 16 years. Zed is quite snappy. The Claude Code integration in VS Code is brilliant. I've used the CLI in the JetBrains terminal. I had no idea I could revisit past conversations until I used the VS Code extension!
- Dayshine 10mo agoZed is snappy in the same way that notepad ++ is snappy: If you don't support 10% of language features you can avoid the hard work. Unfortunately this means that non trivial projects have false positive errors everywhere.
- eterm 10mo agoI completely agree. Likewise I'm amazed Microsoft hasn't done it themselves for Roslyn and Copilot. Roslyn analyzers are so incredibly powerful, and it's being ignored. An explainer for others: Not only can analyzers act as basic linters, but transformations are built right in to them. Every time claude does search-and-replace to add a parameter I want to cry a little, this has been a solved science. Agents + Roslyn would be productive like little else. Imagine an agent as an orchestrator but manipulation through commands to an API that maintains guard rails and compilability. Claude is already capable of writing roslyn analyzers, and roslyn has an API for implementing code transformations ( so called "quick fixes" ), so they already are out there in library form. It's hard to describe them to anyone who hasn't used a similarly powerful system, but essentially it enables transforms that go way beyond simple find/replace. You get accurate transformations that can be quite complex and deep reworks to the code itself. A simple example would be transforming a foreach loop into a for loop, or transforming and optimizing linq statements. And yet we find these tools unused with agentic find/replace doing the heavy lifting instead. Whichever AI company solves LSP and compiler based deep refactoring will see their utility shoot through the roof for working with large codebases.
- atmosx 10mo agoIs Roslyn available only for .NET?
- eterm 10mo agoYes it's the name of the .NET compiler API. It was code-named to disambiguate it from the old compiler. But Roslyn is almost 15 years old now, so I can't call it new, but it's newer than the really legacy stuff. It essentially lets you operate on the abstract snytax tree itself, so there is background compilation that powers inspection and transformation. Instant renaming is an obvious benefit, but you can do more powerful transformations, such as removing redundant code or transforming one syntax style into another, e.g. tranforming from a Fluent API into a procedural one or vice-versa.
- neonsunset 10mo ago[dead]
- reactordev 10mo agoWhen you become complacent and your ego isn’t checked, you think you have the hottest thing. Hubris is hard. They had a pretty big moat that they let vscode eat away at. I don’t think they saw any of this coming and are struggling to make sense of it.
- dist-epoch 10mo agoThey are trying now to create an agent-first IDE. I think they are too big to move on this. https://blog.jetbrains.com/fleet/2025/12/the-future-of-fleet/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/fleet/2025/12/the-future-of-fleet...
- edelhans 10mo agoThey just announced the end of their fleet editor
- dist-epoch 10mo agoYeah, and that they are pivoting it to an agent first editor.
- HyprMusic 10mo agohttps://air.dev/ https://air.dev/ provides more info, for anyone who's intrigued.
- wiseowise 10mo agoAfter fleet fiasco? No thanks.
- reactordev 10mo agoI heard really good things about Zed, lol. I’m with you. I canceled my jetbrains subscription a couple years ago and I have no intention of returning. They have been superseded and are no longer a relevant company. AI has made them obsolete. Atlassian is next…
- conradfr 10mo agoJetbrains seems a bit lost these days. Look at that very recent screw up [0]. I thought about moving after 10+ years when they abandoned the commit modal, and jacked up the plan prices, but I barely understand how to commit things in Vscode anyway. Let's see in 2026. [0] https://blog.jetbrains.com/datagrip/2025/12/18/query-consoles-are-coming-back/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/datagrip/2025/12/18/query-console...
- _virtu 10mo agoThe commit workflow was what kept me locked in to the ecosystem for so long. LazyGit was so good that it convinced me I didn’t need JetBrains anymore. If you love the workflow with JB for commits check out LazyGit. It’s a TUI so you can use it in any editor without much friction.
- notpushkin 10mo agoOr if you prefer a GUI (still separate app, so works anywhere, too): https://git-cola.github.io/ https://git-cola.github.io/
- shunia_huang 10mo agoGraphical interface won't work well inside WSL, that's why I dropped my subscription on GitKraken and start using lazygit. lazygit simply works in almost any environment, and it works extremely well even if you are not into terminal stuff.
- notpushkin 10mo agoYeah, that’s the power of TUI. I would probably give it a go, too, but Git Cola works for me on Linux and Mac without too many issues. (By “works anywhere”, I meant you can use it with any IDE or editor, or just run it from terminal, though it is cross-platform and should work on Windows, just not sure how well it would play with WSL.)
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- 0x696C6961 10mo agoLSP supports refactoring commands
- joshribakoff 10mo agoBut Claude Code does not, which is the point you have missed
- WahyuS002 10mo agoIt really does feel like the Innovator's Dilemma playing out for JetBrains. They have the best semantic understanding of code (PSI) locked away in their proprietary engine, but they seem too attached to the traditional "human-driving-the-IDE" paradigm. Tools like Claude Code (and Cursor) are treating the editor/CLI as a fluid canvas for the AI, whereas JetBrains treats AI as just a sidebar plugin. If they don't expose their internal refactoring tools to agents soon, the friction of switching to VS Code/CLI becomes negligible compared to the productivity gains of these agents.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- _virtu 10mo agoI’ve been a JetBrains toolbox subscriber for over a decade. I used to run trainings for new hires to get them up to speed on the eco system as our team would provide licenses. I say all of this because I was about as fanboy as you could get for them. They’ve dropped the ball over the past five years. Part of me thinks it was the war in Ukraine that did them in. The quality of tooling and the investment in Fleet and AI slop was the death nell for me. I was slated to renew at the grandfathered price on the 17th and decided to let my subscription lapse this year because the value prop just isn’t strong enough anymore.
- porker 10mo ago> They’ve dropped the ball over the past five years. Part of me thinks it was the war in Ukraine that did them in. I'm also a subsciber for over a decade, and came here to say the same thing. I don't know how their teams were distributed across eastern Europe and Russia but the war is when I pinpoint quality declining. I've kept my subscription for now as for PHP and Symfony nothing comes close, but I'm actively looking to move away.
- kachapopopow 10mo agoI am trying my damn hardest to drop jetbrains, the only thing they have a stronglehold over is their amazing rust analyzer in rustrover. And yah I agree that they are dropping the ball on providing actual intellisense to AI tools, like why not? It's probably less than 10 lines of code.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- cherryteastain 10mo agoWhat does rustrover do that rust-analyzer itself cannot?
- kachapopopow 10mo agorust analyzer fails 13 lines into my main.rs file because I use something rust analyzer just doesn't work with that well, also it's much faster
- bravit 10mo agoHi! I’m from the RustRover team. RustRover is a full-blown IDE, not just a code analysis engine like rust-analyzer. In addition to Rust code analysis, RustRover provides many features, including code linting, code formatting, dependency management (Cargo.toml editing), UI debugging, support for web technologies and databases, and AI support (including an agentic approach with Junie). Comparing code analysis capabilities themselves is quite difficult, because Rust is a very complex language, especially when it comes to implementing IDE-level support. Features such as macros make this even more challenging. RustRover and rust-analyzer use different approaches to solving these problems, and we also share some components. Of course, neither approach is perfect. Depending on the specific project, the developer experience may vary.
- whatever1 10mo agoJetbrains is unforgivable for missing the remote development train. People have been developing on remote huge machines for decades. It’s just the ones who did either were terminal wizards, or they were using hacks to make their IDEs tolerable. VSCode just scooped up that market with their remote development plugin. And it did not matter that it is an electron app. Still faster than Jetbrains.
- rurban 10mo agoJust customize emacs. Their refactoring and AI packages are good, and it's faster.
- wiseowise 10mo agoThey’ve also dropped a huge ball with resisting LSP for Kotlin, thinking that they could lock developers into their ecosystem. Well, now (hopefully) it is too late, karma is a b*tch.
- troupo 10mo ago> I really can't understand why JetBrains hasn't integrated its refactoring tools into the AI system. Because their refactoring tools are not a "slap on a couple of commands and delegate actual work to external code" like LSP? Because their tools are a huge collection of tools deeply integrated into the IDE? Including custom parsers, interpreters and analysers?
- raincole 10mo agoIt's interesting that everyone is saying "please don't shove AI down our throat!". But when a company actually takes this approach (JetBrains IDEs treat AI just as a tool at the sidebar), everyone is like "JetBrains is doomed because it's not agent-native enough."
- unfunco 10mo agoJetBrains are shoving it down our throats though, I have to uninstall their AI plugin after every IDE update, CoPilot suddenly stopped working? Oh, it's because JetBrains has enabled their AI auto-completion feature and it's broken CoPilot.
- coder543 10mo agoYour logical fallacy is assuming two different groups of people are the same people, which never leads to productive conversation.
- wiseowise 10mo ago> It's interesting that everyone is saying "please don't shove AI down our throat!". Ever thought that two vocal minorities might not overlap, or even represent opinion of a bigger group?
- jayd16 10mo agoYeah, I really appreciate that JB has not made an utter mess of my IDE and has not forced anything on me.
- lowsong 10mo agoThey've tried to play it both ways. Not AI enough for the AI fanboys, but want to keep a toe in there for everyone else. They'd be better placed rejecting AI entirely, and then when the bubble pops they'll be well positioned to sweep in and eat VSCode's lunch with a product that actually works.
- dostick 10mo agoJetbrains+refactoring - don’t get your hopes up. In Android Studio refactoring was broken for 5+ years and ticket is one of most voted. And nothing happened.
- dfaiv 10mo agoShameless repost - I'm so sad that JetBrains seems to be floundering. VS Code still doesn't match it in little "oh my gosh, how did it know I wanted that" moments, but the whole JB experience is now just so clunky, especially in a modern WSL2/poly-lang env. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45846798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45846798
- insane_dreamer 10mo agocan't speak for other languages, but the python LSP in PyCharm is miles ahead of any other lsp out there (and I've tried them all). I give `ty` the best chance of catching up to them, but they're still a ways behind.
- johnebgd 10mo agoI bought the JetBrains AI last year to support them even though it wasn’t good. It never improved. I didn’t renew. Now, I’m questioning if their tooling is something I’ll even renew at all. All of these AI agents integrate so well into visual studio code…
- rkomorn 10mo agoBeing a JetBrains customer lately feels like watching everybody else race by in their cars while your horse is trying to eat the carrot in a grocery store ad on the side of a bus stop I get it, horse, you're confused, but we got places to go.
- exceptione 10mo agoYes. It is so easy and cheap to refactor in a strongly typed language--no AI needed. And such a waste of electricity, chips, water and money to let some AI model give it a shot. This something we could reliable and correctly do for decades with serious tools and languages. To this day people still 'refactor' by doing string replacement and hoping for the best. Any serious IDE should just say no to that.
- arm7 10mo agoOne thing you can still do is use Windsurf's agent, Cascade, inside Jetbrains: https://windsurf.com/plugins/jetbrains https://windsurf.com/plugins/jetbrains
- MischaPanch 10mo agoFortunately, Serena has recently been extended to use JetBrains instead of LSP (via a plugin), solving exactly this issue. LSP will never be as good as JetBrains' parsers. https://github.com/oraios/serena#the-serena-jetbrains-plugin https://github.com/oraios/serena#the-serena-jetbrains-plugin