Possibly an interesting data point is that my company pays for every engineers’ Cursor usage, can’t imagine how much it could cost, but they don’t have any encouraged integration with JetBrains… so while JetBrains products are good, I’m wondering if Cursor simply has a better sales team and hype pushing them to higher valuations
My workflow is somewhat Byzantine—mostly just use shells and basic tools like find and grep do most of what IDEs do (sure somewhat worse).
That and I copy and and paste from my favorite AI chat and that’s it. Paste a code block, or an entire file for context.
Like taking notes with a pencil and paper—which helps information uptake—I believe it’s actually important to slow down and take a moment to think.
If you have fully memorized all of Linux and GLibC and all your supporting libraries then yeah, I guess you don't need powerful tools.
Since I dont need updates every 5 minutes, I disable the update checker if on Windows, and just don't update my software stack all of the time as it inconveniences me.
Granted, they're not the worst offenders. When I read that Jira has been updated, I need to work up the courage to look at it because I expect it to just be worse on every level.
> I wish it was a more stable product
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-72046 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-79448 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-78077
I can't get how poetry support problems were introduced. They have made new patch release just before Christmas holidays which introduced major problem (IDE periodically updates package lock file). It took them 3 months to fix it. After a few weeks they reintroduced the bug and said that it is feature and added registry option to revert to old functionality. I still do not understand what is the reason for updating package lock file.
I almost always file a report, many of which remain unresolved. In several cases I've reported bugs that are promptly marked as a duplicate of a years-old bug. For example:
* The Go plugin appears to make the IDE is very slow (>10 seconds) at detecting files changed outside the app. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/GO-18510/IDE-is-very-sl... (1 month old now)
* The file modification icon gets stuck (saving doesn't clear it), possibly because of some Git state tracking. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/GO-18094/File-modificat... (3 years)
* The "next/previous error" navigation shows the line error but then immediately hides it again. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IJPL-156089/Next-Highli... (11 months old)
All three relate to what I would call core functionality, rather some rare, niche language feature. They all disproportionately affect my daily use. How can a serious company let bugs like these hang around, not for one week, or two weeks, or a month, but three years?
My guess from the amount of churn in YouTrack is they're churning out too many features creating more bugs at a higher rate than they can fix them, and are simply overwhelmed, and their triage process must be deprioritizing a lot of basic stuff.
My most recent bug: After upgrading to 2025.1, the IDE freezes completely 1-2 times a day, requiring a force quit. I reported the bug 10 days ago, collecting all the output they ask for in such cases, and all I've gotten are crickets. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-371932/IDE-freezes...
Which one?
Last time I checked JetBrains' AI tool and it was laughably bad compared to Copilot. My bar was quite low already as I hadn't even used Cursor by the time.
Edit: What I tried is "JetBrains AI Assistant". I haven't tried Junie yet.
Java/Kotlin is their main thing, and yet neither Maven nor Gradle builds are stable. If your build fails or there are some unresolved dependencies, you restart IDE in hope it works...
AI coding tool trial failed for me -- IDE told me it's not activated even after I activated it on billing portal. And doc implied it might take some time. WTF. Does it take some batch processing?..
People who were able to get AI coding tools working said it's way behind Cursor (although improving, apparently).
Aside from their initial AI plugin rollout fiasco it has been smooth sailing for me.
And if "If your build fails or there are some unresolved dependencies" you check your dependencies and config.
I'm tired of people complaining and not trying to understand how their systems (or an IDE for that matter) work.
Because JetBrains products DO have issues, but rest assured, the things you are complaining about are on the main path of basic features they take care of the most.
Source: at first reluctant but now happy IntelliJ user, after thinking for a long time that Eclipse/Netbeans would be better. I was wrong.
To be fair with OP, I had a similar experience in the previous company. Sometimes after bumping a dependency or something, even if you asked IntelliJ to "Reload All Gradle Projects" something wouldn't work and I needed to restart the IDE. Not saying it was common, but it did happen. This was a Kotlin codebase.
Now working in a company using Scala, I had a few cases where IntelliJ failed to resolve a dependency correctly so it was saying that the class I just created didn't exist (this was in shared library and two different dependencies pulled it, but we did pin the dependency directly and sbt was building it correctly, it was only IntelliJ that was becoming confused). Cleaning up the build sometimes worked, sometimes didn't, but even when it worked it would go back after a while. Eventually we updated all dependencies in all projects and it now always works, but it was painful for a while.
But I can tell you IntelliJ has way more issues than e.g. Visual Studio I used 20+ years ago.
> With a modern laptop I just don’t care at all if my IDE takes up a few gigs of RAM.
If Jetbrains reimagines their settings persistence story, I'd be happy to give that a try since otherwise it's quite great still!
They also have a pre-built customer base to sell them to.
I do think they have a perception issue with devs whose perspective on their products was crystallized back in the 2010s when they were using some old company laptop with 8GB of RAM when they could feel too heavy. With a modern laptop I just don’t care at all if my IDE takes up a few gigs of RAM.
JetBrains also ranks well on things like low-latency input, which surprises a lot of people. They do seem to care about developer experience.