Thread

1. joshstrange · 1790077328 · focus · HN ↗

   I’ll try this out but after over a decade as a paid JetBrains customer I’ve been looking at the door. I still love their IDE and moving around the code in it but the IDE uses way too many resources. Even with me excluding the worktrees folder it gets stuck indexing/processing when I spin up new worktrees to the point that I’ve found myself killing IDEA regularly to regain system resources. 99% of my work happens in the terminal now and JetBrains has been very slow to adapt. If I get one more “can’t checkout branch, it’s checked out in a worktree” error I’m going to lose my mind, give me an auto-heal option or something. This is how work is done, don’t make me leave your IDE to fix it myself on the cli.

   I’ll try out Air but I don’t have high hopes, my current workflows work great and I’m still not sold on what Air offers even after reading this post and the page about Air.

   1. dijit · 1790077849 · focus · HN ↗

      I tend to feel fine with IDEs using buckets of resources, after all: they are specialist tools.

      But I have been using their jetbrains remote system, and you can clearly see how incredibly high the RAM usage is on both server and client.

      Personally I am also looking at the door, but not because of the resource usage… but because they keep putting resources into things which aren’t their core offering and it makes me wonder if they have run out of innovation in that area.

      … then again, they did recently figure out how to make development on a Windows remote work… so I can keep using my linux machine while developing Windows software, so I think that earned a lot of goodwill from me.

      1. foresterre · 1790078866 · focus · HN ↗

         I find I still use the paid IDE's (RustRover and WebStorm), even when using LLM's for reviewing code and applying corrections. It's often just faster to do that, especially with an IDE which allows for quick non linear navigation through the files (following functions etc.). I think this is where JetBrain's IDE's excel. I can live with the high startup cost as long as it is quick afterwards.

         I do feel however they have been neglecting anything non-AI for a while now. I in particular loved their auto complete, and with the new guesswork AI auto complete it's just not the same. I want deterministic behaviour from my IDE.

         On the LLM side, I couldn't use the Anthropic subscription with their offerings, so I just use it from a harness outside the IDE, and switch to the IDE for review. This may not be JB's fault, but it still makes their offering useless to me.

         I may be one of the few remaining but I also still program myself sometimes (I weigh it based on the task). The IDE has been pushing so much AI it has been getting in my way sometimes, and it is definitely using more resources for stuff I don't use.

         I too am on the fence on whether I'll resume my subscription. Luckily for JB I dearly dislike VSCode's code navigation and interface, and would severely miss their debugging tools integration.

         1. neuraldenis · 1790082337 · focus · HN ↗

            > I couldn't use the Anthropic subscription with their offerings

            We tried to make this work, but unfortunately hit a hard stop with Anthropic: their current policies do not allow us to support this integration :c

            We still hope to resolve this in the future

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