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. pauleveritt · 1790082639 · focus · HN ↗

      JetBrainer here. About worktrees, I've seen the internal demos and we are making progress on that. It's actually an interesting problem, conceptually, about the index.

      About the terminal, honest question...is that because you are looking at code less and less? Writing code less and less?

      1. joshstrange · 1790083188 · focus · HN ↗

         Yes, it’s because I’m writing less code by hand. I mostly use IDEA now to navigate/review the code or do my own debugging/tracing. My time in the IDE has fallen drastically which is why the high ram/cpu usage when I’m not even “using” the ide are so frustrating, especially since I’ve excluded the nested worktrees parent folder (.claude/worktrees). I can handle IDEA being dumb when it comes to worktrees, I can’t handle it locking up after I’ve told it to ignore them.

         I know harnesses (and harness harnesses) have a long way to go and lots of improvements even without models getting “smarter”, I’m rooting for JetBrains but so far IDEA has been more of hindrance in the LLM-era. The CLI TUI’s have become the most important tool I have and the GUI versions haven’t kept pace.

         I’d love to live in IDEA instead of the CLI but so far I’ve found that to be too limiting and not as adaptable to our rapidly changing field. Maybe Air will help with that, we will see.

         I want something like herdr in IDEA, a way to monitor agents, smart worktree integration, easily visualize changes and use the power of the InteliJ brains to assist in coding (lint/checks/etc).

         Right now my IDE gets more in my way than assists me in shipping code.

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