Fleet started as our attempt to explore a new generation of JetBrains IDEs, developed in parallel with those based on the IntelliJ Platform. Over time, we learned that having two general-purpose IDE families created confusion and diluted our focus. Rebuilding the full capabilities of IntelliJ-based IDEs inside Fleet did not create enough value, and positioning Fleet as yet another editor did not justify maintaining two overlapping product lines.
I want to begin by saying I love JetBrains IDEs. I go out of my way to personally pay for PyCharm Professional, DataGrip, Rider, and others, and have done so for years, so I can use it at work where the next best thing provided to us is VS Code, or Visual Studio...
Please, for the love of all things almighty, re-invest in your core IDEs. That's what you're known for, and that's what professional developers want.
I don't want a glorified text editor that does a few cheap tricks, and is 'AI first'. I know I'm going to piss off a few people here rubbishing VS Code, however people are blown away when I show them how much more powerful PyCharm is when debugging complex code.
Its embarrassing that there are many popular, numerously starred, issues across JetBrains' YouTrack that have been open for nearly a decade, that are already well integrated features in other, free, IDEs.
However all is not lost - you have a great suite of products that need much more tender love and care. They'll see you through.
You already have AI in the AI Assistant plugin. Make your core fleet of IDEs worth the investment, for new and existing JetBrains customers alike. AI, agentic or not, will only get programmers so far before it's time to toss the kids toys then break out the real tools that require human intuition, domain knowledge, and reasoning.
To pick up on one of the points in the article:
> Combining them in a single tool results in a disjointed experience, so the Fleet team chose to stop competing with IDEs and code editors and instead build a product focused on agentic workflows. This led to a pivot to a new product: an agentic development environment.
You don't need to develop an entire IDE/environment for this. Develop plugins/enhance the existing AI Assistant plugin for these workflows that integrate with your existing IDEs, 'the real tools' I was talking about above.
I feel like this new "agentic development environment" is making the Fleet mistake all over again, when you could be value-adding to your already great suite of IDEs directly by way of plugins, and also continue to refactor and improve your IDEs along the way.
Please make remote development work well in the IntelliJ-based IDEs. It's very difficult to get corporate employers to continue supporting their toolchains locally when VSCode Remote is "good enough" and disposable cloud VMs are so much easier to support/secure/manage/scale.
The development experience in IntelliJ-family IDEs is incomparably superior, but you have got to figure out how to run the code indexing on the remote server and the UI locally. This quasi VNC thing isn't it.
You'll have a smaller base of users that don't want AI slop, but will keep using your AI anyway even if it's there.
But what you lose is the large paying corporate customers that demand 'soup de jour' that end up going to VScode or whatever, and you may never get them back.
Building software is hard, being profitable at it is even harder.
If JetBrains want's to provide a simple plugin for Copilot or Anthropic to keep the vibe coders happy, I'm not going to complain about the feature. It just seems for the past couple years they have been primarily distracted with AI: AI Assistant, Junie, and now agentics.
