>a JetBrains employee said that reviews were removed because they mentioned issues that had since been solved
That shouldn't be considered a valid reason to remove a review. I could maybe understand down-weighting reviews as they age and as issues are resolved, but as a potential buyer of some product/service/whatever, knowing that something was released with a bunch of issues (even if now solved) is a valuable signal. Preferably, they would reply to reviews and say "XYZ was addressed in update ABC" or something.
Nuking reviews is a valuable signal as well, I guess. Just not in the way that they hope. Knowing that they've done that has (further) lowered my impression of them.
Yes, it's a terrible excuse, and it's concerning that they think it's a good one. I highly doubt that they make a habit of fielding requests from plugin authors to nuke outdated reviews: you simply can't scale the verification that would require to do honestly. If they don't offer this as an option to others then this move is wrong both for the reasons you give and because they're claiming a privilege in their app store that they won't afford to their competition.
I wonder if they remove reviews that complain about bugs that were resolved (at least according to the plugin author) for all other plugins that aren’t theirs… Do they? … yeah I thought so.
Ive seen plenty of reviews in app stores where the vendor responds to negative reviews and confirms when the issue described in the review was fixed. Is JetBrains also removing positive reviews that mention features that have been discontinued?
They should attach a YouTrack issues to reviews, which would automatically show that the issue has been fixed. Their YouTrack integration is pretty deep elsewhere. Still doesn't solve the problem of the average score, though.
My comment complaining about it being bundled and enabled by default, with no way to uninstall, only disabled. They gave me the same excuse, but those "features" are still exactly the same as they were then.
Normally I'd agree but this is a project that has changed significantly over a verey short period of time. Those reviews may simply not be relevant anymore. I trust that JetBrains going forward will simply respond to the reviews, not remove them.
“ I previously submitted a review critiquing this plugin, but it was removed by JetBrains moderation — an unfortunate decision that, in my view, undermines trust in open feedback.
I have now tested the latest AI plugin (v243.23654.270.16).
The plugin does offer limited support for third-party providers like Ollama and LM Studio (the latter being a better fit for most local LLM users). However, this support is restricted to chat interactions only — not to autocomplete, inline suggestions, or in-editor refactoring tools.
In practice, this limitation significantly reduces the plugin’s value for users who already maintain ChatGPT Pro accounts or local LLM workflows. Rather than fully enabling local model integration, the design seems oriented toward promoting JetBrains’ proprietary cloud models and subscription services.
Specific ratings: • Integration with IDE: 5 stars — Excellent UI integration into JetBrains products, smooth setup. • Performance: 1 star — Noticeable latency compared to local models; frequent delays. • Available Features: 1 star — Limited flexibility for serious LLM users; core features locked to cloud services. • User Interface: 1 star — Chat feels bolted-on rather than deeply native; inconsistent UX across project types. • Documentation Quality: 1 star — The documentation exists but feels sparse, with limited guidance on third-party setup and unclear disclosures about feature limitations.
While some users may find the plugin sufficient for lightweight AI chat, in my assessment, it falls short both in technical flexibility and in respecting user choice.
Thank you to JetBrains for providing the opportunity to share my neutral and unbiased observations with fellow developers” [1].
> The spokesperson added that the company could have done better
They seem to have to say that a lot about this product, yet they don't really seem to learn any lessons. When the original flood of bad reviews came it it was because they made that plugin bundled with the IDE and then had a "bug" where it couldn't be effectively removed. There was no precedent for bundled a paid plugin nor need for it to be bundled with the IDE. Just their desperation to cash in. They then walked that back with the same "we could have done better".
This is more of the same. The "AI Assistant" still lives on the default side bar regardless if you have that plugin installed or not.
At this point, they know they could do better yet are choosing not to.
I'm really concerned over the last couple of years that my two paid subscriptions (work/personal) go into AI BS development I do not need, instead of fixing pain points I have daily. It may continue for so long. I hope to see they defend the removal of AI assistant completely, by moving it completely off the main channel. They are not MSFT that can waste a billion here and there. Every AI feature they make is paid by existing users.
Yeah, I cancelled my subscription when it became clear they just did not care about my custom any more. The core products had pain points just sat with open issues forever, and they just started doing nothing but trying to upsell me on stuff I didn't care about or want.
I used to be a huge evangelist for JetBrains products, I loved having a product where I felt like I could just pay and get something of quality, it's really sad seeing that devolve into the same mess of "you are the product" as virtually everything else, despite the fact they were still demanding my money.
I even tried, when my old work-paid CoPilot subscription expired, to use a paid membership for their AI tool. It was so-so, but I was happy to give them money. And then my modest use for my personal open source project hit their monthly limit.
So I just went back to CoPilot.
I know they don't have deep pockets, but, like you, I'd rather they just spend it on making a good tool.
The second a better product comes along I'm moving away from Jetbrains. Unfortunately I think we're about to get into an IDE winter since everything thinks all problems should just be solved by AI rather than doing the hard work like "good refactoring tools" and "acceptable user experience".
Even without AI winter, I don't know how you can catch up to intellij. Vscode is a hodge podge of dubious quality plugins by randos. I'm sure you can build yourself a nice IDE by being very selective, but part of what I'm paying for is the curation and cohesiveness, and I think you need a big player that is invested in building something for a large variety of use cases. I think Microsoft has their own set of tooling that works for them at their company and so does Apple and I'm not sure Google really wants to make a public IDE. Any small scale startup will take many years to catch up.
They have much superior product compared to VSCode in terms of pretty much everything, except AI.
Not sure why it’s so hard for them to catch up with Cursor. They have everything they need but somehow they focus on just something that they don’t have much expertise, building models instead of better integration. It’s a shame seeing such good product going downhill considering AI is becoming fundamental for dev productivity.
> They have much superior product compared to VSCode in terms of pretty much everything, except AI
Disagree, I keep trying Jetbrains once in a while and keep walking away disappointed (used to be a hardcore user). I use VS Code bc it is seamlessly polyglot. Jetbrains wants me to launch a whole separate IDE for different use cases, which is just horrible UX for me. Why would I pay hundreds for a worse UX?
They’re in a difficult position because half their users want more AI but the other half complain loudly when it’s forced on them. Cursor is beating them because they can deeply embed AI everywhere without worrying about this.
Yeah, I’ve spent some time building IntelliJ plugins, and honestly, the authoring experience has some real limitations. It’s not the easiest platform to work with, especially when it comes to writing automated tests. That might be part of the reason why their or any third-party AI plugins don’t feel as smooth as the ones on VS Code.
I actually have hopes that this will work out for them in the long run. Their bet seems to be at this point including the AI stuff in with the subscription: staving off the existential threat to their business without charging more, while still not having to spend insane amounts paying for someone else's model.
At least with code completion it's pretty obvious at this point that no one needs the overpowered top-line models, and the trajectory on local LLMs is such that I don't think it's unreasonable for them to hope to avoid the big players entirely.
They don't need to beat Claude for it to work, they just need to keep their customers satisfied.
Not great. Any other company would have been put on my greedy-morons list. But i believe JetBrains is special and is allowed more mistakes than others.
I also believe they should really stay calm and not get sucked into the AI hype. Worst case they will be the heroes to the people who like to program for the joy of it, in case these AI IDEs should really take over (which i highly doubt).
I love JetBrains and hate vscode, but Cursor was such a huge productivity boost that I ended up switching. Unfortunately none of the JetBrains plugins (Junie, the older AI Assistant, Windsurf/codeium, etc) come close yet :(
After hearing so much about Cursor, and then reading your comment, I decided to give it a try. Here's my honest, first ever time trying to use it:
- I go to its website and neither on the homepage nor the features tab does it bother listing what languages the IDE is even for. Is it Python? C? HTML? It's an IDE .. for what? What languages? What project types? How can they not list this basic fact?
- Oh well, click the big Download link, and it downloads an app image file. No idea what to do with this, never seen one before, have to google it.
- Mark the file as executable and run it and get a cryptic error: "The setuid sandbox is not running as root" and it errors out.
- Back to google, google for that error message. Find various Cusor bug reports and people complaining about it but they haven't bothered fixing it.
- Find a workaround, to pass in a –no-sandbox arg when running Cursor, and now I get it to launch.
- It opens up but the text is incredibly small on my (4K) monitor and the text coloring is a dark grey that's almost indistinguishable from the background color, immediately go look for settings to fix it. There's ~50 settings results for "font" or "size", I change a few of them and it seems to make no impact to the UI font and I quickly give up and just want to try the editor.
- I read online that I need a "CMake Tools" extension to open a CMake project. In cursor I open the extensions marketplace and search for "CMake" and there's zero results. I try to open a CMakeLists file anyways and it opens it as a text file and then prompts me to install a "CMake Tools" extension. Ok? Why didn't it show up in the marketplace before?
- I click the popup about the CMake Tools extension it opens the marketplace page for it, showing me the details about it. Whilst I'm reading the details for example to see who the author of the extension is, whether it's even a legit extension or not, the reviews of it, it just automatically installs it by default without me clicking the Install button that was on the page.
- After installing the extension the CMake file I opened is just in a tab but hasn't imported the CMake project, so I close it and re-open it from the File->Open menu.
- It again just opens the file as a plain text file and doesn't actually try to import the CMake project in any way, I don't see any popup or button or call to action to actually import the CMake project in any way.
Ditto, I love JetBrains, but cannot ignore Cursor. I use the IntelliJ shortcuts / Darcula extensions to help with familiarity.
Among the ones you mentioned, I also tried Gemini Code Assist JetBrains extension, but it doesn't integrate anywhere close to what Cursor does. (Direct code inserts, rollbacks, checkpoints, context integration) Zzzzz come on JetBrains
I cancelled my JetBrains license a few days ago after I was required to agree to new terms and conditions, they expended no effort and took zero time to explain the changes, what has changed and why, I was shown a ridiculously long legal document and asked to agree or get fucked. There was no feedback option when cancelling the subscription, they clearly don't care.
I used to be a fan of jb products since they used to give it out for free in college, and continued using it into my professional career (I loved the refactoring tools!). However, lately they have been adding too much junk to their IDEs.
Have switched to my very old workflow of using nvim and customizing it with NvChad.
The correct approach, IMO, is to try to incentivize re-review after the issues have been fixed. Not delete the negative reviews. If you want to prove you're customer centric with your product and that you actually care, you can find a way to encourage them to change their vote.
It's quite shocking to me how many people already told me to disable the annoying "single line" AI-completion if I ever were to try out a JetBrains IDE.
> AI services are expensive to provide, because they tend to be processor-intensive, but competition between vendors is a likely reason for JetBrains introducing a free tier earlier this month
If it's so expensive, why do they force it on everyone? Sure, a lot of folks want support for this, but enabling it by default is just annoying for their long-time users. Not to mention the costs of full AI-completion, I hope they don't get the idea of also enabling that by default.
The whole Jetbrains product suite is sliding downhill quality wise. Can we go back to the days of yore where it was just a lightning fast Java code editor and it did that extremely well?
This has also been my experience. Every update brings new weird bugs that disrupt my workflow - it's gotten bad enough that I've stopped updating their tools when the bugs aren't in main parts of my workflow, because while updates may fix those, they are sure to introduce even worse ones. And it's not like I'm doing crazy stuff, for a while even copying text made a "Copying..." dialog pop up and freeze the editor for a while.
Unless something drastically changes, I won't be renewing my license anymore. I don't like VS Code, but it's been much more reliable than the Jetbrains tools I use.
I really keep trying to replace Jetbrains with VSCode, and I keep going back. VSCode is just so deficient in comparison in ways on which I depend. But yes, Jetbrains keeps making that statement harder and harder to make for me
It really has. I had to disable the GitHub plugin to get rid of a PR comment box that wouldn't disappear.
Junit test runs say No tests available about 50% of the time
It feels slower and slower
Today I started getting "unable to save settings" or something, no idea what that is about
It really shows that they're distracted from quality. My guess is with the breadth of features and quite amazing attention to detail, they needed 100% dedication to those efforts, and now a chunk of the company is doing something else, and now the product is falling apart
But hey we have a totally new console engine or something so that's really nice (I've personally never used the console ...)
I agree, they should focus more on quality, because there are still a ton of tiny, yet annoying issues.
In Webstorm it sometimes does not recognize comments (colorizes them as code), does not reliably recognize multi line ToDos, and frequently warns me in a if (myVar == null) that myVar may not have been initialized.
At least the last issue is as old as the hills, has been reported several times, and yet they seem to be unable to properly fix it.
Agree ever since Roman Elizarov left that company has gone downhill big time. Crashing all the time, stuff that should be rock solid because it so common. Like the other day syntax errors stopped being highlighted. I never update because every time something will be broken guaranteed.
Confirmed - it is an expensive turd. Windsurf IntelliJ plugin is better and faster at auto complete and has useful interactive natural langue interaction based coding features.
I have been using this pairing for the past eighteen months and it has been a very productive and smooth experience. The Codeium/Windsurf JB IDE plugin is much better than their standalone vscode fork IDE
There is already a huge discussion going on about their big re-design last year, so I guess they are now feeling the burn with all the users leaving...
I never managed to get anything out of Junie. Each of my queries end up with an internal process stuck on a loop eating 100% CPU until I kill it. Back to Windsurf for now which is disappointing because I much prefer PyCharm for everything else.
From consumer perspective, I’m actually not against this probably. Would be nice to have way to give more weight to reviews relevant to current product version. Old reviews are very confusing for consumers since they basically provide false information about the product.
Right? Are 3rd-Party Plugin developers allowed to ask for old negative reviews to be deleted? I would guess that no, you cannot request that, because Jet Brains are overstepping their position.
I would LOVE to see a paid plugin challenge Jet Brains on this by asking that their old negative reviews get deleted under threat of legal action.
Yeah, unfortunately, they have to jump on the AI bandwagon because they are forced to by other editors, providing free AI, but they simply do not have the skills to integrate the AI properly. It's a shame, and unfortunately removing negative reviews will not help as people will simply migrate to a different product. You can have three 5 star reviews, but that doesn't help if nobody else is using it.
ziddoap|10 months ago
That shouldn't be considered a valid reason to remove a review. I could maybe understand down-weighting reviews as they age and as issues are resolved, but as a potential buyer of some product/service/whatever, knowing that something was released with a bunch of issues (even if now solved) is a valuable signal. Preferably, they would reply to reviews and say "XYZ was addressed in update ABC" or something.
Nuking reviews is a valuable signal as well, I guess. Just not in the way that they hope. Knowing that they've done that has (further) lowered my impression of them.
lolinder|10 months ago
serial_dev|10 months ago
rchaud|10 months ago
chmod775|10 months ago
zamalek|10 months ago
mystified5016|10 months ago
DaedPsyker|10 months ago
hahn-kev|10 months ago
willcipriano|10 months ago
"We fixed yesterday's outage, review removed"
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
TZubiri|10 months ago
sgt|10 months ago
JumpCrisscross|10 months ago
“ I previously submitted a review critiquing this plugin, but it was removed by JetBrains moderation — an unfortunate decision that, in my view, undermines trust in open feedback. I have now tested the latest AI plugin (v243.23654.270.16). The plugin does offer limited support for third-party providers like Ollama and LM Studio (the latter being a better fit for most local LLM users). However, this support is restricted to chat interactions only — not to autocomplete, inline suggestions, or in-editor refactoring tools. In practice, this limitation significantly reduces the plugin’s value for users who already maintain ChatGPT Pro accounts or local LLM workflows. Rather than fully enabling local model integration, the design seems oriented toward promoting JetBrains’ proprietary cloud models and subscription services. Specific ratings: • Integration with IDE: 5 stars — Excellent UI integration into JetBrains products, smooth setup. • Performance: 1 star — Noticeable latency compared to local models; frequent delays. • Available Features: 1 star — Limited flexibility for serious LLM users; core features locked to cloud services. • User Interface: 1 star — Chat feels bolted-on rather than deeply native; inconsistent UX across project types. • Documentation Quality: 1 star — The documentation exists but feels sparse, with limited guidance on third-party setup and unclear disclosures about feature limitations. While some users may find the plugin sufficient for lightweight AI chat, in my assessment, it falls short both in technical flexibility and in respecting user choice. Thank you to JetBrains for providing the opportunity to share my neutral and unbiased observations with fellow developers” [1].
[1] https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/22282-jetbrains-ai-assi...
JumpCrisscross|10 months ago
terminalbraid|10 months ago
They seem to have to say that a lot about this product, yet they don't really seem to learn any lessons. When the original flood of bad reviews came it it was because they made that plugin bundled with the IDE and then had a "bug" where it couldn't be effectively removed. There was no precedent for bundled a paid plugin nor need for it to be bundled with the IDE. Just their desperation to cash in. They then walked that back with the same "we could have done better".
This is more of the same. The "AI Assistant" still lives on the default side bar regardless if you have that plugin installed or not.
At this point, they know they could do better yet are choosing not to.
andrekandre|10 months ago
mystified5016|10 months ago
buybackoff|10 months ago
Latty|10 months ago
I used to be a huge evangelist for JetBrains products, I loved having a product where I felt like I could just pay and get something of quality, it's really sad seeing that devolve into the same mess of "you are the product" as virtually everything else, despite the fact they were still demanding my money.
cmrdporcupine|10 months ago
So I just went back to CoPilot.
I know they don't have deep pockets, but, like you, I'd rather they just spend it on making a good tool.
terminalbraid|10 months ago
8n4vidtmkvmk|10 months ago
tacker2000|10 months ago
I spent about a month getting to grips with it, and now i feel more productive than ever, and I regret not doing it sooner!
Also I can rest assured that it will be forever free, no more annoying licenses to deal with.
babyent|10 months ago
Vibe as a service
buremba|10 months ago
Not sure why it’s so hard for them to catch up with Cursor. They have everything they need but somehow they focus on just something that they don’t have much expertise, building models instead of better integration. It’s a shame seeing such good product going downhill considering AI is becoming fundamental for dev productivity.
cle|10 months ago
Disagree, I keep trying Jetbrains once in a while and keep walking away disappointed (used to be a hardcore user). I use VS Code bc it is seamlessly polyglot. Jetbrains wants me to launch a whole separate IDE for different use cases, which is just horrible UX for me. Why would I pay hundreds for a worse UX?
nojs|10 months ago
zabil|10 months ago
lolinder|10 months ago
At least with code completion it's pretty obvious at this point that no one needs the overpowered top-line models, and the trajectory on local LLMs is such that I don't think it's unreasonable for them to hope to avoid the big players entirely.
They don't need to beat Claude for it to work, they just need to keep their customers satisfied.
pjmlp|10 months ago
Visual Studio is still the best for C++, followed by C++ Builder.
VSCode is the only Electon app that I tolerate on my own computers.
When is InteliJ finally going to support JNI development instead of requiring two IDE licences?
esafak|10 months ago
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
endofreach|10 months ago
I also believe they should really stay calm and not get sucked into the AI hype. Worst case they will be the heroes to the people who like to program for the joy of it, in case these AI IDEs should really take over (which i highly doubt).
homebrewer|10 months ago
Lately they've also been coddling with the VSCode crowd by aggressively pushing the new UI over loud objections of old loyal users.
Either one seems like direct opposite of the hacker user you're mentioning.
zer0-c00l|10 months ago
thegrim33|10 months ago
- I go to its website and neither on the homepage nor the features tab does it bother listing what languages the IDE is even for. Is it Python? C? HTML? It's an IDE .. for what? What languages? What project types? How can they not list this basic fact?
- Oh well, click the big Download link, and it downloads an app image file. No idea what to do with this, never seen one before, have to google it.
- Mark the file as executable and run it and get a cryptic error: "The setuid sandbox is not running as root" and it errors out.
- Back to google, google for that error message. Find various Cusor bug reports and people complaining about it but they haven't bothered fixing it.
- Find a workaround, to pass in a –no-sandbox arg when running Cursor, and now I get it to launch.
- It opens up but the text is incredibly small on my (4K) monitor and the text coloring is a dark grey that's almost indistinguishable from the background color, immediately go look for settings to fix it. There's ~50 settings results for "font" or "size", I change a few of them and it seems to make no impact to the UI font and I quickly give up and just want to try the editor.
- I read online that I need a "CMake Tools" extension to open a CMake project. In cursor I open the extensions marketplace and search for "CMake" and there's zero results. I try to open a CMakeLists file anyways and it opens it as a text file and then prompts me to install a "CMake Tools" extension. Ok? Why didn't it show up in the marketplace before?
- I click the popup about the CMake Tools extension it opens the marketplace page for it, showing me the details about it. Whilst I'm reading the details for example to see who the author of the extension is, whether it's even a legit extension or not, the reviews of it, it just automatically installs it by default without me clicking the Install button that was on the page.
- After installing the extension the CMake file I opened is just in a tab but hasn't imported the CMake project, so I close it and re-open it from the File->Open menu.
- It again just opens the file as a plain text file and doesn't actually try to import the CMake project in any way, I don't see any popup or button or call to action to actually import the CMake project in any way.
- I give up and just switch back to my normal IDE
warmedcookie|10 months ago
Among the ones you mentioned, I also tried Gemini Code Assist JetBrains extension, but it doesn't integrate anywhere close to what Cursor does. (Direct code inserts, rollbacks, checkpoints, context integration) Zzzzz come on JetBrains
roegerle|10 months ago
zamalek|10 months ago
cadamsdotcom|10 months ago
“Hi, we’ve updated and these issues should be addressed now. Please take a look and let us know what you think!”
serial_dev|10 months ago
If you control both the product and the platform, deleting negative reviews is much more convenient than actually resolving the issues.
unfunco|10 months ago
persavon|10 months ago
xyst|10 months ago
Have switched to my very old workflow of using nvim and customizing it with NvChad.
reactordev|10 months ago
qiu3344|10 months ago
> AI services are expensive to provide, because they tend to be processor-intensive, but competition between vendors is a likely reason for JetBrains introducing a free tier earlier this month
If it's so expensive, why do they force it on everyone? Sure, a lot of folks want support for this, but enabling it by default is just annoying for their long-time users. Not to mention the costs of full AI-completion, I hope they don't get the idea of also enabling that by default.
mrlonglong|10 months ago
pandemic_region|10 months ago
Timon3|10 months ago
Unless something drastically changes, I won't be renewing my license anymore. I don't like VS Code, but it's been much more reliable than the Jetbrains tools I use.
jghn|10 months ago
switch007|10 months ago
Junit test runs say No tests available about 50% of the time
It feels slower and slower
Today I started getting "unable to save settings" or something, no idea what that is about
It really shows that they're distracted from quality. My guess is with the breadth of features and quite amazing attention to detail, they needed 100% dedication to those efforts, and now a chunk of the company is doing something else, and now the product is falling apart
But hey we have a totally new console engine or something so that's really nice (I've personally never used the console ...)
jansan|10 months ago
In Webstorm it sometimes does not recognize comments (colorizes them as code), does not reliably recognize multi line ToDos, and frequently warns me in a if (myVar == null) that myVar may not have been initialized.
At least the last issue is as old as the hills, has been reported several times, and yet they seem to be unable to properly fix it.
owlstuffing|10 months ago
pacman1337|10 months ago
Thaxll|10 months ago
throwuxiytayq|10 months ago
(Please don’t disappoint me by saying “they added an optional feature and I don’t like it”)
toyg|10 months ago
Uh, I don't think it's ever been "lightning fast"... Great at refactoring, navigation, and boilerplate generation, yeah; fast, no.
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
steve-atx-7600|10 months ago
ssousa666|10 months ago
tacker2000|10 months ago
chuckadams|10 months ago
dygd|10 months ago
> When you open a workspace with Augment enabled, your codebase will be automatically uploaded to Augment’s secure cloud.
[0] https://docs.augmentcode.com/jetbrains/setup-augment/workspa...
nicolaslem|10 months ago
Pesthuf|10 months ago
ingvar77|10 months ago
wolvesechoes|10 months ago
gitroom|10 months ago
tdiff|10 months ago
cnbeining|10 months ago
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/08/...
good-luck86523|10 months ago
explodes|10 months ago
I would LOVE to see a paid plugin challenge Jet Brains on this by asking that their old negative reviews get deleted under threat of legal action.
ilrwbwrkhv|10 months ago
T3RMINATED|10 months ago
[deleted]